Monday, November 17, 2008 by River City Random.

It has been about three weeks since I lost my job. There were a number of factors involved, and I have every right to be bitter about it. However, it would do me no good to play the blame and complain game now. Mistakes were made on both sides. It was just not meant to be, and let’s leave it at that.

I do know however that it would have gone better for me if I hadn’t been so anxious all the time when I was on the job. If I had not been crippled and browbeaten by my rampant insecurity, my insecure craving for approval, and my obsessive desire to please others and avoid conflict, I might have remembered that it was a minimum wage job and that the fate of the universe did not rest on my shoulders. I might not have had the panic attacks and the nervous breakdown that led to me spending the last few weeks hiding in the house afraid of my own shadow.

I have a problem with anxiety. I am loath to call it a “sickness” or a “disorder” because I partially brought it upon myself by bad lifestyle choices. However, this anxiety is so ingrained in me and so stuck in my brain that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to fix solely through willpower and positive thinking alone. And it is not only killing me, but destroying my chances for happiness. I’ve got to do something about it before I succumb to its madness, and I certainly need to get it under control by the time I start my next job. I only wish I knew what to do.

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Sunday, November 9, 2008 by River City Random.

Over the last several weeks, the Style Network has been plugging this new show called Ruby, about an obese woman’s struggles to lose weight. Since I have an interest in the subject (being both trying to lose weight and attracted to plump women) I tuned into the premier episode tonight. I was worried to start with. I thought it was going to be one of those “reality” shows where they yell at and humiliate fat people to get them to exercise, or one of those exploitation shows they have about “the world’s fattest people” on the Sideshow Freaks Network Discovery Health Channel. I was pleasantly surprised. I was pleasantly surprised. It was exactly what it says on the tin: it was the first episode of an ongoing series about a woman named Ruby Gettinger who, being fed up with being 487 lbs. and unable to do most anything with her life, sets out to lose weight and change her life for the better. It’s presented in a very low-key and respectful manner. Her obesity is presented primarily as a health and a psychological issue, not as “OMG she’s so ugly let’s give her a glam makeover!” Ruby herself is a very attractive and articulate woman and clearly presents what her problems are and what she wants to achieve from her televised journey of self-discovery. When she said her goals were to be able to paint her own toenails, take a bubble bath in a normal-sized tub, and be able to sit in the lap of a man she loves, I felt a deep kinship with her. Not that I want to paint my toenails or sit in some guy’s lap, but I know how it feels to be unable to do things that non-obese people take for granted. I was also impressed that those were her goals, as opposed to goals like “I want to be the biggest loser so I can win a million dollars” or “I’m going to get buff so I can kick sand in dweebs’ faces at the beach.” Even though I am sure she is getting an awful lot of support and consideration from the Style Network for doing this, I am still impressed by her sweetness and sincerity.

I am also impressed by the effort and the money the Style Network is putting into promoting this show. I mean, the commercial was everywhere, from Fox News to the National Geographic Channel, and it’s been running for weeks now. And if you go to their website, they have her picture all over the place. I mean, when’s the last time you saw a supersized BBW in the mainstream media portrayed so beautifully? By beautifully, I mean in a way other than as “dead fat woman was so huge they needed a forklift to get her out of her house and they had to bury her in a piano crate.”

I also like how the show is suggesting a holistic approach to weight loss, emphasizing exercise, healthy eating, and psychological health over “let’s slap on a gastric bypass and hope for the best.” So I really hope they keep showing this show, and that we see her continuing inspiring journey. And judging from the comments she’s beeing getting on the Style Network forums, she’s already inspired a lot of people. I know this is inspiring me… to find out how I get a weight-loss show of my own

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Sunday, November 9, 2008 by River City Random.

I just spent a week trying to fix two Windows machines, Kate’s old laptop and my mom’s old HP Celeron-based desktop that she never uses anymore. The laptop kept crashing and the desktop wouldn’t read any disks in the DVD drive. I wanted to fix one of them so my mom could play games (she is really wearing out her copy of Harvest Moon for the Gamecube.)  I thought the problem was a question of drivers, so I reinstalled Windows XP on them both. After a long and arduous process of downloading and installing drivers and security patches, the laptop kept crashing and desktop still couldn’t recognize the DVD drive. I opened both computers to check the hardware. No cords unhooked, nothing unusual. Then I installed Linux on both of them. After a long and arduous process of downloading and installing drivers, tweaking config files and recompiling kernels, the problems remained, and new problems emerged because of Linux’s lack of support for my systems’ proprietary hardware.

I was totally freaking out last night. I seriously doubted my skills as a computer genius, and I beat myself up a lot unnecessarily. However, I came to several conclusions. Through trial and error, I discovered what the problems were on the laptop. By running CHKDSK on the hard drive, I found enough bad bytes on the drive to fill the Grand Canyon. It also needs a new battery. I believe that if I can get the money to buy a new hard drive and battery the laptop will run just fine. The desktop, on the other hand, was a cheap-ass piece of shit when we bought it, several years past its prime, and it couldn’t even tell me that the DVD drive had a cracked lens until I opened it up. It was indeed not a driver issue as I had been led to believe. So I salvaged its 80 GB hard drive and stuck it in my iMac. I now have a use for the iMac as a place to back up the files on my MacBook laptop, and my dad has $5 worth of scrap metal from the old computer. If I boost the iMac’s RAM up to 512 MB (which will only cost me $30 or so), I can probably run Mac OS X or Linux on it. And Mom will get her computer once I can get a hard drive for it (the battery can wait since she doesn’t need to use it away from home.) So I guess I didn’t need to worry too much about it after all. What I do need to worry about is where to find Windows games my elderly, nearly-blind mother would enjoy…

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Tuesday, November 4, 2008 by River City Random.

As I am writing this, all the major news outlets are calling the election for Barack Obama, who is leading by a considerable margin in the electoral college and by several percentage points in the popular vote. And McCain has already conceded. I don’t know what to think or to believe. I could not bring myself to vote for him because of his connections with ’60s radical and domestic terrorist William Ayres, the $2 million house he bought through convicted fraudster Tony Rezko, the incredible amounts of voter fraud committed on his behalf that he supposedly knew nothing about, and the $150 million that “miraculously” appeared in his campaign coffers overnight. I saw him as nothing but another tax-and-spend liberal career politician, who, upon taking office, would raise taxes, give handouts to his buddies, send more jobs overseas, eliminate off-shore drilling and nuclear energy programs that would have decreased our dependence on foreign oil, and weaken our defenses against our enemies abroad. Not that I think John McCain could do any better; even if he isn’t George Bush, he would have too much baggage from the previous administration and too much gridlock from a Democratic Congress to get anything done.

I hope that Obama isn’t the boogeyman that my fiercely right-wing parents and Fox News have painted him to be. I really hope that he is able to do something constructive in the White House, instead of sinking it deeper into scandal and corruption, like Bush did, and Clinton did to a lesser extent. Perhaps the charisma and optimism that this man seems to exude will rub off on the country in a good way.  I just wish I could work through my distrust and paranoia of him, and of the entire American political apparatus.

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Thursday, October 30, 2008 by River City Random.

I was fired today, without notice, without reason. I went into work, and my manager told me to clean out my locker and never come back. I cannot think of a single thing I did badly enough to be fired about. I can only think that this may have been politically or economically motivated. The only thing I do know is that since I was a probationary employee, they are allowed to fire me without reason at any time during my probation. Also, for that reason, I cannot sue for wrongful termination.

I am completely heartbroken, and totally embarrassed. I can never use that library again, even as a patron, because the shame is just too much to bear. It’s the only library within 20 miles of me, and I am now cut off from it forever. That hurts even more than being fired.

I guess I am no longer the Random Librarian, or any librarian at all. I will have to find a new reason to live, if I am to continue doing so.

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Wednesday, October 22, 2008 by River City Random.

I got internet access on my Linux laptop, finally. I was driven into a frenzy trying to solve this problem yesterday, so much so that I accidentally spilled Diet Pepsi all over my cellphone and nearly broke the damn thing. I was so distraught over that this morning that I told my family that I needed to be alone and spent the day in what is now my sister’s trailer. While dozing and practicing meditative awareness, I realized that since the Ethernet port was fully functional on the Linux box, I could share the internet connection on the MacBook through an Ethernet cable to it. The instant I hooked up the cable, Ubuntu instantly went online and downloaded the missing drivers. I know the wireless card works now; I’ll try the modem one later. I’m still connected to the Ethernet port, downloading critical updates as well as a program for playing DVDs through Linux.

I am impressed with the relative ease in which Ubuntu fixed itself once I gave it the right internet connection. Linux has come an awful long way towards ease of use since the very first time I installed Red Hat 6.2 on my old Pentium-233. I spent days trying to find, compile, and install the necessary drivers for my sound and video cards, and the only help I got was a bunch of assholes on IRC screaming “RTFM noob!” I haven’t had to compile anything on this machine yet. The GUI is as user-friendly as Mac OS X, everything is listed in plain English (or your choice of 33 other languages), and there are extensive help forums on the Internet geared towards people of all computer backgrounds. I no longer regret spending $13.99 for their official DVD install disk. All it needs is better fonts and some more games and it would give Windows a run for its money.

I am also impressed with myself, because I learned that if I calm down and give myself the space that I need, I could fix this problem. I really need to work on not getting anxious so much, and not treating everything like it is a life-or-death situation.  I also need to stop taking everything everyone says and does personally. This seems hard, especially given my track record, but if I can fix a problem I had previously considered impossible, I can do that too.

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Monday, October 20, 2008 by River City Random.

After a short plane flight and an uneventful layover in Vegas, my sister is finally home from Yellowstone. She will be home for the next six weeks, and then return to Wyoming in early December in time for the winter season to start. I am happy to have her home. It is so nice to have someone I can talk about nerdy stuff too. I’m also happy to have someone here who has a reasonably optimistic point of view, which has been sadly lacking in this house lately. We’ll have fun. I have a lot of movies and things that she hasn’t seen yet, and once Kate’s luggage arrives in the mail, we’ll play with her Magic: The Gathering cards. Who knows, maybe I’ll restart my WoW account too and find out if I can make it work on 28.8k dialup.

That certainly beats the other things I’ve been doing on my computer, to no avail. Last week, I installed Ubuntu Linux on my old PC laptop, thinking that a free, resource-light operating system would work better with it than Windows XP, which keeps crashing it. Ubuntu is great. It’s fast, it has lots of software, it even recognized the ATI graphics card–but there’s just one problem. I can’t get on the internet. It does not recognize the dialup modem or the wireless card. It can’t even see them. I looked around on the internet for hours and the only thing I could come up with was a proprietary modem driver offered by Conexant for $20. It’s the only thing on Linux that isn’t open source, I guess. The Ubuntu forums were no help either. The general consensus was that if you’re still using dialup in 2008 you’re stuck in the Stone Age. My only hope for getting internet access would be either to do some sort of complicated internet sharing thing with my MacBook and a crossover cable, or to buy a new external modem. I think I’ll stick to Windows for the time being.

I wish I was a geek. I really do. I wish I could grok programming or cobble together my own modem driver. But those things would take much more time than I am willing or able to put in. I thought that with the recent advances in Linux it would be easier. Oh well. I have no need for any Linux-specific software right now. I’ll learn programming on my Mac instead.  Or maybe I’ll learn Spanish. That would be more applicable to my job now, even if programming skills would help me in the information sciences ultimately.

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Sunday, October 12, 2008 by River City Random.

I am getting more used to working now. I found that the dress shoes I was wearing were making my feet hurt even worse than they should be, so I switched to an old pair of tennis shoes. While my feet still hurt considerably, especially after work, I find it a lot easier to do my job now. And while it has been busy, and I have had my share of irate patrons, I am able to cope with that too, especially since the unruly teenagers who were causing all the fuss last week have been banned. However, I am still unprepared for the more depressing parts of the library profession.

Over the last week, my job has been to pull all of the juvenile and young adult fiction books off the stacks and read their circulation records. Any book that has not been checked out in two years gets discarded and put in our booksale. This is called “weeding the stacks,” and supposedly it’s intended to free up shelf space for new and more popular titles. I understand that from a business perspective, as well as from the standpoint of providing library patrons with fresh and relevant material. That’s not the depressing part. The depressing part is that a third of the juveniles and over half of the young adults were destined to be weeded. They had not been read in two or more years. Many of them looked like they had never even been touched before.

As me and my coworkers scanned in the piles of paperbacks on our desks, patterns emerged. Some books were popular, some books were not, and after a while, it was easy to determine which those books were, even without the use of the computer.

Books like these made the cut:

• Fantasy novels, including the Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, and His Dark Materials series. (No complaint here.)
• Books for girls with horses or fairies on the cover.
• Books for boys with military machinery, trucks, sports figures, or robots on the cover.
• Books for children with graphic depictions of “amusing” bodily functions. (Captain Underpants, mostly.)
• Comic books graphic novels. Especially Naruto and Yu-Gi-Oh.
• Anything written by Tim LaHaye and/or Jerry B. Jenkins.
• Young adult novels featuring vampires, werewolves, witches, demons, or hunters of the same.
• Goosebumps. Not a single Goosebumps novel met the chopping block.

The following types of books were destined for the chopping block:

• Anything written over ten years ago unless assigned for a class. Poor Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary never saw it coming.
• By correlation, all of our Sweet Valley High, Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books bit the dust too.
• Not even a Caldecott or Newbery Medal could save many of the books that were to be discarded.
• Pretty much everything I read as a child. No more Mushroom Planet or Homer Price books. No more Rats of NIMH. No more Pigman or Superfudge.
• Young Adult books set as period pieces, like during the Civil War or in Colonial America.  However, the Dear America and American Girl series are incredibly popular with elementary-school children.
• Anything and everything with an Arab, Hispanic, or East Asian-looking child on the cover. Black protagonists were spared if they were either a) in a book assigned for school or b) a music or sports celebrity.
• And pretty much everything with a “Classic” sticker unless assigned for class. Mark Twain must be rolling around in his grave.

I guess I should be happy that kids are reading, especially given that everyone these days says kids are living in a post-print media age, but I’m sad about their choice of books. How could they pick Left Behind: The Kids and The Clique over great books like To Kill A Mockingbird or A Wrinkle in Time is a mystery to me. Oh well, maybe I am just getting old, and that’s depressing too. Anyway, we have tons of books to sell in our booksale now, where, for a limited time only, you can get a whole bag full of books for just $1. Hopefully the kids that do read will pick some of these up before my library sells them to a paper recycler.

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Saturday, October 4, 2008 by River City Random.

Life has a way of keeping one humble. When I took this job at the library I thought that I would be a whiz at it from the get-go because I was so good at it as a volunteer, and because my self-professed computer savvy would make using the computer system a breeze. I was wrong. I never had to deal with the public. I never had to tell five skinhead teenagers wearing chains and brass knuckles to stop molesting a thirteen-year-old girl when I was a volunteer. Nor did I have to contend with con artists using fake IDs to get library cards under assumed names, or homeless people sleeping under the tables in the multipurpose room. Nor did I ever expect to have to defuse two patrons who nearly came to blows over which of them would get to rent our one copy of the Iron Man DVD.

And as for the computer system–blech! The user interface is out of Windows 3.1, using screens of cryptic unmarked icons in place of useful text-based menus. Even the crappy web front end that patrons use to access the card catalog is easier to work with. And the policies it uses are out-of-date, so you have to manually override, for example, every 7-day video because the system thinks all videos can only be checked out for 3 days. Nobody at the county thought of changing that for us, and nobody here knows how. So every time someone rents some 7-day videos, I have to type in about three different security codes for every video they check out. And if I forget, I’ll never hear the end of it from that patron, and from that boss.

My boss and co-workers all tell me that I am doing a very satisfactory job, but I just don’t know. I feel like I am messing up more times than I am getting it right. There’s just so many things to remember, like the exact order in which I am supposed to power on the computers in the morning to the prices of all our products and services. (For some reason, they are not posted anywhere on the premises, or easily locatable in any of our manuals.) And furthermore, apparently some patrons find my efficient, professional personal customer service style a little too off-putting–one woman who comes into the library says that my formal mannerisms “out-French the French,” and another patron, who wished to remain anonymous, confided in a friend of mine that I am very capable, but “does he ever smile?” All this time, I thought I was being very friendly, greeting them as they came in, and always being polite and respectful. I guess they would prefer someone who would sit around and gab all the time. Oh well. You can’t please everybody, especially when you’re just starting out.

Frankly, though, it’s been hard masking my inner torment behind the plaster smile of an effective customer service professional. Not only do my feet hurt all the time, but crappy stuff has been happening at home too. I’m overdrawn at the bank, which will eat most of my first paycheck. My dad got his property tax statement and found that in horror that the value of our house is now lower than it was when we bought it twenty years ago. And due to the California budget crisis, we will no longer be able to receive low-income homeowner assistance. I guess the Fox News fearmongerers were right. Before too long, we will all be reduced to eating onion sandwiches like Neil Cavuto’s mom did during the Great Depression.

But what can one do? I’m just lucky to be employed and living in a house that, at the very least, isn’t being foreclosed on. Only time will tell where the economy will go, or if I can ever feel comfortable in the shoes of a library page…

Posted in Library, Politics | Print | 1 Comment »

Saturday, September 27, 2008 by River City Random.

It is very interesting how things turn out in life. Three years ago I had a job with, for want of a better word, a subprime mortgage lender. You know, the ones who are all going belly-up now and causing the current financial crisis? Well, I helped contribute to that, in my small way. I approved loan applications for minimum-wage burger flippers we lured into buying $300,000 houses. I was on the phone all day with UBS, IndyMac, GMAC, Countrywide, et al., getting interest rates locked for NINJAs (borrowers with No (stated) Income, No Job and No Assets). I worked with my boss to package bundles of mortgages and sell them on the securities market. Fannie and Freddie were my bitches. The money was rolling in, and while I was listed on paper as making scarcely above minimum wage, I was given an awful lot of “bonuses” and “incentive programs” (although in retrospect those might have been payoffs to keep my mouth shut about what was going down in there.)

I didn’t realize what was happening at the time, though. I quit not because I uncovered any criminal behavior on the behalf of my employer, but because our car broke down and I had no way to reliably commute the 30-plus miles to work every day. But if I had been able to keep going to work, I would have been able to prosper. I would have had money in the bank. I would have been able to buy a nice car. I would have moved out of my parents’ house into a clean apartment closer to work (or better yet, finagled my way into homeownership with the help of my connections in the industry.) I would have also proposed to that woman who I was so in love with at the time. We might have even had a child by now.

But it was not to be. It’s a good thing too, because I just learned that this mortgage bank just went belly-up like all the others. My former coworkers are bankrupt; my former boss is probably in jail. I would have been pulled in with them. If I wasn’t made to take the fall for my firm’s shoddy accountancy, I would at the very least have lost my job. I would have no experience in anything but mortgages, and I would have had a really hard time finding a job that paid as well as my old one to cover all of the expensive collateral I no doubt would have purchased. And when my emotional problems caught up with my financial problems, I’m sure not even my beloved L. would stay around to pick up the pieces.

And I would not have gone to Yellowstone, and seen the world outside my own little desert. I would not have had that experience, which I believe has been the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life. And I definitely would not have gotten this job at the library. (Even if it was offered to me, I couldn’t have afforded to take the cut in pay.)

I wonder what happened to my friend L., and how she is doing. She no longer lives at home, and since her parents only speak Spanish (and never had a very high opinion of me to begin with) I can’t get any information from them. I wish I could have been a better man for her. I wish we could have had a chance to be more than just good friends playing at romance. But she could do better than me, and probably did. It’s just as well though. It was not to be fated, and if fate was right about getting me out of the subprime mortgage crisis, it was probably right about us too.

She is the only regret I have about the whole situation, not the money, or anything else about the job for that matter. But my future in the library field is looking pretty good right now, and when I go to work at the library, I never have to worry about if what I’m doing will cheat someone out of their home or break the economy. I think it all worked out for the best.

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