I've been pondering yesterday's post, wherein I confessed to an unhealthy crush on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Let's get a few things straight about my crushes. They are frequent, long-lived, intense, and pathetically hopeless. Sometimes I develop crushes on people I actually know. (I understand this to be relatively normal behavior.) More often I develop crushes on people I don't know. This makes sense statistically. Being shy, I don't know many people; there are over 6 billion folks I don't know, if that gives you any perspective.

"Sounds reasonable," you're saying to yourself. This is my blog and you will say what I want you to say. "Why, I have a crush on Johnny Depp, and I don't know him!"

Yeah, you and me both, honey. You, me, my mom, this lady who works in circ, this guy friend of mine who's not even gay, and bloody well every person on the planet. Celebrity crushes are a common phenomenon. Though it bears mentioning that my crush is, to be precise, more focused on pirate captain Jack Sparrow than on Monsieur Depp. Arrr!

Celebrity crushes are one thing, but what I'm trying to say here is that I have the capacity to crush on anyone: man, woman, deity, anthopomorphization, spiritual abstraction-- you name it, I've crushed on it. He/she/it could be alive, could be dead, could be fictional. I develop crushes on supreme court justices. I develop crushes on authors if they've written books I liked. I then develop crushes on the characters in those books.

This goes a long way to explaining why I'm a character-driven reader, doesn't it?

I suspect I have trouble separating reality from fiction. How about we demonstrate this with a story?

The Tooth, The Whole Tooth, and Nothing but the Tooth

I can't recall believing in Santa Claus and I saw through the Easter Bunny ruse at a very early age, but the Tooth Fairy had me snookered. Every time I lost a tooth, I found money under my pillow. (Or one time, memorably, a plastic baseball bat.) I believed in her. I mean I really believed in her. I prayed to her, I kid you not. In my grasp of the facts, she looked suspiciously like Tinkerbell and lived on a distant star.

Toward the end of my tooth-losing career, though, I became suspicious. On my second-to-last tooth, I wrote a letter to the tooth fairy to ask her if she was real. I thought it was a clever idea, but I didn't want to publicize it, lest someone sabotage my plan. The only person I told was mom.

When I received a handwritten note from the Tooth Fairy, a note that was not in Mom's handwriting, my faith was restored.

But-- o ye poisonous, traitorous thought! -- doubt festered in me. Could it be possible? --oh I hated to think it-- could it be possible that Mom, my own mother, could be playing me for a fool?

I had but one baby tooth still clinging to my gum. It was my last chance to prove or disprove the Tooth Fairy Theorem. I was in second grade.

When I finally tongued out that last bastion of my juvenile toothset, I breathed not a word about it, not even to mom. Guilt plagued me. I should be sharing this triumph with her, not walking around with my hand clasped over my mouth. But I had to know.

And-- oh blessed Tooth Fairy, forgive me my human frailty! -- she came, she took that tooth, she left me a dollar, and she wrote me a note! Despite my weak faith, the Tooth Fairy still loved her gap-mouthed child.

Years later-- and I do mean years, though wild tigers could not compel me to confess how I old I was-- I confronted mom and asked her the truth about the Tooth Fairy.

"Nope," said mom. "Not real."

Adulthood sucks.

...so you see that, even at a very young age, I was inclined to form meaningful relationships with people who did not, in fact, exist. This explains why I loved the Star Wars movies. I first saw them when I was ten, old enough to know better but unable to resist forming relationships with Han, Leia, Luke, and company. I knew-- I knew-- they weren't real, but I prayed to God (though not the Tooth Fairy) to let the Millennium Falcon land in my backyard and whisk me away to Hoth. I practiced using the Force, albeit without much success.

For context, remember that I didn't have much in the way of what you'd call friends.

I eventually concluded that Han, Leia, and Luke didn't want my company. It was devestating. I replaced this conclusion, somewhat later, with the only-slightly-less-painful realization that fictional characters weren't going to hang out with me. They just weren't.

I have still not fully recovered from that realization. You begin to see, then, why I still form attractions to people who simply will not reciprocate my love, all because of the lousy roll of the die that caused them to be pretend and me to be real.

(This has spilled over into real life, too. You won't catch me being attracted to available, attainable, decent folks. Nope. In high school, for example, I wanted the guy who was simultaneously quarterback/valedictorian/voted-best-all-around.)

So we have established, in laborious detail, why it is that I give my heart to impossible conquests like Tony Scalia. I can't help myself. It's kind of sad, but I'd like to think it's charming, too, in a hopeless sort of way.

What truly disturbs me is the character of these men I obsess over. (I do mean "men." Lesbrarian though I may be, it is typically men who wring my heart.) They are all smart, and that in itself isn't bad. The most attractive thing to me is intelligence. That's not lip-service. That's what sets my heart a'flutter.

No, the disturbing part is that I turn to silly putty over bad guys. Wicked-smart bad guys, but bad guys. Look at Mr. Rochester, my first true love. (There's an excellent essay, by the way, on the eroticism of Charlotte Bronte, titled "Reader, I Shagged Him.") He imprisoned his wife in the attic and he treated Jane like shit.

• Look at Scalia. He wants to tap your wires.
• Look at Howard Roark: he hates you. He's destructive. He wants to rape you.
• Look at Hannibal Lecter: he hates you. He's destructive. He wants to eat you.
• Look at Ivan Karamazov: he hates you. He's destructive. He wants to kill you.
• Look at Yevgeny Bazarov: he hates you. He's destructive. He wants to kill himself.

These are not the sort of men I should bring home to mom-- though honestly, after that stint she pulled with the Tooth Fairy, she deserves one of them for a son-in-law.

Rumor has it you're not supposed to drink alone. Thank goodness I have cats. You're never alone when you have cats.

I'm drinking wine this evening because my head hurts and because I had an emotionally draining day at work. (I suspect the one caused the other.) Why wine, rather than beer or liquor? (Liquor? I don't even know her!) I'm not what you'd call a wine connosseur. Or a connosseuse, if we want to get the gender right in our francais. I pick my wine based on a variety of criteria, mainly

• Does it have a cute animal on the label? (Yes-- a kangaroo)
• Was it on sale? (Yep-- 6 bucks at Farm Fresh)
• Was it packaged in a box? (No-- thank goodness. Don't want anyone suspecting I grew up in a trailer park.)

This bottle here passed the three-pronged test. Haven't drunk enough to be BWI (blogging while intoxicated). I'd say that's a good thing, though I do so love when Marian the Librarian gets intoxicated and starts professing her love for me. (I know I shouldn't take it personally-- when she's BWI, Marian professes love for everything with two and/or four legs, as well as legless, abstract concepts such as reading and democracy-- but still.)

But anyway, I'm drinking wine because it gives me a warm tingly feeling. Beer's nice, but I never feel all glowey from it. Liquor's nice, but I go from sober to smashed without warning. Not a good idea for a worknight.

So I'm listening to the Violent Femmes, a group I didn't discover until I was 25. (Hey! I am 25!... yes, well, if you didn't have any radio reception except for 99.9 Kiss Country when you were growing up, you'd be behind the curve, too.) And I'm drinking wine, and I have a magazine of logic problems to work on, and a fabulous novel called Straight Man to finish-- it's this irreverantly funny academic humor book-- and, yowza, looks like I won't be working on my book proposal, again. Oopsie.

Last night I finished The Deluxe Transitive Vampire. As you may suspect, it's one of those books I had to read simply because of the title. I can't say I recommend it as a grammar book-- the examples were difficult and I don't think it improved my facility with the language-- but it was filled with pictures of nekkid ladies and with sexually-charged demonic word examples. "A book to sink your fangs into," said William Saffire, who's got to be the most uptight, conservative, narrow-minded prick of a Republican grammarian ever, but who is nonetheless smart as a whip. I think I have a crush on him, but don't tell. (My weakness is for smart men. The weakness is debilitating to the point where I think Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is dead sexy, in an intellectual way, e.g., the only way that matters. This is very embarassing.)

(But serioiusly-- indulge me in a parenthetical here-- Scalia is just brilliant. Have you read his case opinions? His interpretation of the 4th amendment makes me weak at the kness. I mean I gotta change my undies every time I hear him assault my civil liberties. Oh how I wish he batted for my team.)

I suppose I should put the wine away, slap some cold water on my face, and clean house. (Apartment. Whatever.) I'm going to have company tomorrow. Grandma and Grandpa called on Tuesday and informed me they'd be in town Thursday and Friday. This is not an everyday occurence. They live in Wisconsin.

Visits with them are always stressful, what with the not-very-veiled comments about the dignity of marriage, the joys of motherhood, and the virtues of regular church attendance. Also, they always manage to make me feel dumb. Tony Scalia, now, he could make me feel dumb and I'd come back begging for more-- but I'm not keen on relatives making me feel stupid.

But hey, it's family, and I'll probably get a free meal out of it. Until then, I am going to brace myself with this glass of wine here.

The Queen of Claremont has brought a terrible circumstance to the attention of the Queen of the Libraries. Namely, the Queen of Claremont is underrepresented in this blog.

The Queen of the Libraries is mortified. We (that'd be the royal We) are going to make immediate recompensation to Her Highness and Her sovereign nation in the form of leftover Halloween candy. Her Highness and Her Royal Consort will be granted full diplomatic immunity for all future visits to Wilhelmsplatz, and We will make futher reparations for a variety of past indignities, such as slavery, apartheid, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the Bubonic Plague, and the Full House sitcom.

...so the entry title is a pun on King & King, a controversial children's picture book that has been reviled, disputed, and outright banned. It's your run-of-the-mill children's story about a prince who's lookin' for true love, and, as you would expect, he does find his heart's content at the end of the book. It's just that he winds up hitched to a boy monarch, rather than a girl monarch.

Out of curiosity I checked to see if Wilhelmsplatz owns it. (Many libraries failed to purchase the title, either because of the mediocre reviews of the artwork or because they wouldn't touch that kind of controversy with a 10 foot pole.)

The good news: yes, we have a copy.

The bad news: we are censoring fascist pigs.

We have a copy but it's hiding in nonfiction. Someone, somewhere, decided to shelve this make-believe picture book in nonfiction. The subject headings clearly show that this is a fiction book, but it has been relegated to the 306 section. That's Dewey for "culture and institutions."

Quiz time! This sort of behavior is known as

• A) censorship
• B) bullshit
• C) homophobia
• D) the encroachment of faith into the public sphere

Ha, ha! That was a trick! All of the answers are correct!

Mine, alas, is not the only library to shelve K&K in nonfiction. The logic in putting it there is to protect parents from accidentally checking out a gay-themed book. If any parents actually want to find K&K, they won't get it by browsing the kids' fiction books, sensible though that would seem. Instead they'll have to go out of their way to look it up in the catalog.

This infuriates me. Some parents don't want to read gay-themed books, sure. Me, I don't want to read "If you don't believe in Christ you're going to rot in hell" books, but I'm not asking anyone to hide them in nonfiction. Being a literate adult, see, I can make my own choices about what books to check out and which ones to pass over.

By hiding K&K in nonfiction, we're denying parents the grace of serendipity. So many times we find great books accidentally, just by stumbling across them on the bookshelves. Why should this title be removed from the serendipitous choices?

Yeah, I know, some people don't want their kids reading about gays. Seems pig-headed to me, since gays, you know, exist. (Gays also raise children, some of whom may be playing with your children, right now.) But hey! Do what you want! Prevent your kid from reading King & King-- that's your prerogative as a parent. But so help me God don't you dare prevent my kid from reading King & King.

Not that I, uh, have kids. But it could happen. I could do the hetero barefoot-n-preggers thing. In fact, I am barefoot as I type this. I am halfway there.

Or even if sperm and egg don't meet, I could adopt. Seems to me the ideal way to do things. I could get myself a whole passle of children, some of a black variety, some of a brown variety. It would be yet another way to piss off the far right.

So anyway, let's pretend I'm doing the domestic baby-raising routine and that there's a daddy in the picture. And while we're in this fantasy, let's pretend I learn to cook, and that I start keeping a spotless home, and that I don't have stretch marks. This is fun!

There I am, the perfect picture of a breeder mommy. You might suspect that I want to protect my children from King & King (and Heather Has Two Mommies, and Daddy's Roommate). You would be wrong. You don't have to live a gay lifestyle to read gay books. Or consider: I am not black, but I like to read Alice Walker. (Why, one of my favorite authors is black!)

But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. We have the blessing from our state constitution to practice discrimination against gays.

I am moving to Canada. I mean it. Or at least Vermont.

Haven't felt this good the day after an election since Clinton won his second term. The day after the 2004 election, in fact, I dressed in black and took a vow of silence. This was a bit tricky as I was working the desk at my library, but it was a specialized academic library and most of the patrons understood. We used gestures and Morse code to communicate. (Kidding about the Morse.) And it wasn't tricky at all in my classes. My professors all understood why I wasn't speaking.

Today I took no vow of silence, and I almost wish I hadn't dressed in black. I look sexy in black, see, is the thing, so I can't possibly regret it. (Of course I look sexy in everything I wear. Right? Right.) I'm thrilled we took the House, and it looks like we may take the Senate, and best of all, Rumsfeld is stepping down. It's the best thing that's happened since Ashcroft stepped down.

But there is one bit of bad news: Virginia voted to write discrimination into the constitution. Our new amendment states that marriage, and the rights conferred by marriage, is between one man and one woman and everyone else can go to hell. (This is a ver batim transcription. Honest.)

Gay couples? Sorry. Hetero but unmarried couples? Sorry. No rights.

Honest to Goddess, I can't understand why people want it written into the constitution. If they disagree with the morality of unwed partners, then they can contol it in their places of worship. Attend a church that doesn't sanction it, or a mosque that doesn't sanction it, or join the Boy Scouts-- but keep your moral attitudes off me. The constitutional amendment is a moral judgment, and in this country, we keep religion and state separate. (I swear, did none of these people study American history?)

The 1 man:1 woman supporters insist that gay marriage threatens the family. But-- and forgive me, maybe I'm just obtuse-- I don't see how. Let's say I pick a woman for a life partner: we can't create kids on our own, sure. But let's say I pick a man for a life partner, and we decide not to have kids. Is that immoral, too? What about old folks? Should they be prohibited from marrying? They can't make babies either.

Or what if I stay single forever? I have a perfectly good uterus going to waste. Am I threatening anyone's family?

If anything, I would think that pro-family types would encourage same-sex couples. Since they can't home-grow their own kids, their best option is to adopt. And since the pro-family types want to make abortion illegal, that means there are going to be a lot of babies out there who need parents. There are already too many unadopted babies. Why not encourage gay couples to adopt the unwanted children of heteros? (Now if we could get cheap, widespread birth control out to the masses, and teach them how to use it, there might not be so many babies to choose from...)

Men and women will continue to marry and have babies. They don't need a constitutional amendment to protect that right. (In China? Yes. In America? Have as many babies as you can pop out.)

At this rate I'm not going to marry anybody-- man, woman, or otherwise-- because I don't want to support the state's discrimination. So there. That'll teach 'em.