The structure of this post shall be as follows:

1. Interesting, positive news
2. Griping, moaning, and kvetching, with a bit of dark humor for comic relief
3. Light-hearted news, to deceive you into thinking that I did not write this post with the sole purpose of griping, moaning, and kvetching. I did, but I don’t want you to realize that.

So! Good news, everybody! I’ve been cited!

Last month, I had an article published in Virginia Libraries. Let’s all close our eyes for a moment and pretend that Virginia Libraries is a prestigious peer-reviewed journal, that Virginia Libraries is not, as I suspect, desperate to publish anything, anything, that someone will submit.

The article was an informal discussion of Blogging for a Good Book that I wrote in one of the following two ways (take your pick):

1. After months of intensive, soul-searching research, with lots of impressive statistics and critical analysis
2. In the wee hours of the morning the day it was due, took me maybe half an hour to throw something together

But then Michael Stephens, who as I have mentioned here before is ABSOLUTELY DREAMY, published a lengthy report in Library Technology Reports, which really is prestigious. He talked quite a bit about my library’s blog as an example of a Best Practice in the application of Web 2.0 technologies in the library sphere. Yay!

And he quoted my article extensively. Ladies and gentlemen, I have been cited. I am a scholar. It’s official.

Now we shall move on to the bit where I complain a lot.

(More observant readers will have noticed that this is a highly structured post. Other bloggers content themselves with “Hey, here’s a neat link!” This thing here has lists and sections and hierarchy. That’s because I’m a diagnosed Obsessive Compulsive. OCD folks need to be in control or they go crazy, literally. Each individual OCD person manifests the need to control in different ways, and to different degrees, depending on how stressful life is being. Since I’m feeling stressed these days, I’m trying to gain control in lots of little ways: By counting steps, by scratching at my head (don’t ask), by writing down lots and lots of lists, and by investing my informal writing with heavy-handed structure. Now you know.)

Things that have me stressed:

1. Money. Somehow there doesn’t seem to be quite enough of it. Not quite sure what the cause is, besides the obvious bit about being a librarian (rather than, oh, a computer programmer or an accountant), having only one household income, and living in a city where the median price of a home is $350,000. Median. That means half of the houses cost more. Mother o’ God.

The money situation probably will not be helped by the need to take Charlotte (my car, not my coworker) to the Toyota dealership for regular maintenance, nor by my need to visit the doctor (this head-scratching thing is getting out of control).

2. My carpet. Spilt beer all over it this evening. Dark beer, because there’s this wonderful chocolate stout that they sell at Farm Fresh. I like it because it’s just one bottle, which naturally prevents me from having “just one more,” and because, despite the gutter swill one normally finds in single-serving beer bottles, this stuff tastes good. But it’s really sort of wasted when its dark color soaks itself into my carpet. And the carpet had already committed an offense against me today, so really this isn’t fair. Gremlin vomited a great deal of kitty food while I was at work.

3. My book. Don’t let’s talk about the book I’m writing. Just trust me that it’s stressful to write one.

4. Work. I love my job, but there’s a lot of work to do these days. It’s nothing like my last job, where there was such an overwhelming amount of work to do that it went past the point of ridiculous and came back through the other side. My present job is nowhere near as stressful, but these past few weeks have been intense. Lots and lots and lots of things are due right away, as in yesterday. Perhaps the worst part is that I brought some of it on myself. In the distant past it seemed like a good idea to teach two classes in one week. What, pray, was I thinking?

5. Work again. Specifically, the people who come up to the reference desk. It’s funny, I can go for weeks on end with happy, pleasant transactions, but then today I get two in a row who put me on edge. For privacy reasons I can’t give you the details of either, but the second one said something that tickled my sense of irony (for those of you paying attention, this is the bit that’s supposed to be funny). She was calling on the phone to request a whole slew of movies, but our policy is to only answer three brief questions by phone. It’s a good policy. It’s our way of showing that people who make the effort to come in to the library get higher priority. But the caller wasn’t happy with this policy, even after I’d politely and regretfully explained it to her—and even though there was a person patiently standing at the desk, waiting for me.

“But I tried calling twice before and didn’t get through!”

Let’s think here: Could it be that she didn’t get through because we were busy helping people in the library? Just possibly?

Oh well, seemed funny at the time.

Finally, I will deliver the bit of frivolous news that I promised as an antidote to the preceding bitching.

I got someone to read The Commitment, by Dan Savage! It’s one of a very few books that I wish everyone would read. In this case, it was my former database rep. I tend to group database reps in the same category of humanity that includes lawyers. insurance salespeople, and DMV clerks. The shining exception was EBSCO rep, who acted like a normal human being and liked to talk books. Except then he got assigned to a different state. And yet he just emailed me to tell me he’d finished reading the Savage book.

Even my friends won’t read the books I suggest, and here one of The Enemy took my advice! At this point, it’s not like he can even influence me to make a sale!

In conclusion, I am going to go scratch my head now. G’night.