This is not how you Wednesday.

I decided to start my day off from work today in my favorite way ever—by waking up an hour earlier than usual, getting dressed, and driving 40 minutes to work for a mandatory 45-minute staff meeting. For extra fun, I followed that up by getting personally called out into the hall and bitched out for not dressing at least business casual for this meeting, which took place before we were even open, despite the precedent for not needing to do so that has been in place for my entire tenure there. Before I drove the 40 minutes back home, I stopped by the work room to grab a nice tasty cup of Folgers—totally the best part of waking up—upon which I promptly burned my tongue.

For lunch, I picked my wife up from work and took her across town to our usual lunch restaurant, to find that their heat was out. Since we didn't have time to go anywhere else, we stayed and enjoyed the cozy ambiance of not one, but two compact space heaters on this lovely 28-degree day. There's really nothing quite like paying to have lunch indoors in a coat and hat.

On the way back, we decided to stop and get some coffee to counteract the effects of mild hypothermia. "Hey, why don't we try that new place that we've heard great things about? It's right on the way," we said. "There's no way that we'll get there and find it surrounded by a chain-link fence because the entire mini-mall is slated for demolition. What are the odds that they're on hiatus until like August?" Fuck.

No matter—we just laughed it off and headed to an old favorite, also right on the way back. Things began to get even better when we found a rare open parking spot just off the square. So of course, as we got out of the car and I pressed the button to lock the doors, I was greeted by the sound of absolutely nothing at all happening, because Battery Light, Motherfucker!

At this point, as I was opening the hood to smack the battery (no, seriously, that's apparently what fixes it when this shit happens), my wife told me that I needed to just go home, lock the door, and not do anything, which is pretty much exactly what I've done because clearly I can't Wednesday.

Librarians are probably the most polite paparazzi ever. Or the politest. I don't know, I'm not Merriam-Fucking-Webster.

So, I had this whole post ready to go about how I broke my ankle at roller derby practice a few weeks ago where I was going to complain about how I always have to have people carry stuff for me and how I can't skate again until probably June, or how fucking exhausting it is to have to do a thousand miniature pole-vaults just to get anywhere, but then something happened on Saturday that made it totally worth it, so I had to rewrite the whole fucking post. Thanks a lot, one of the most amazing things that has ever happened to me.

In an effort to make being stuck in a cast for weeks suck less, I got a blue one, and I painted a TARDIS on it (which I'll admit was a bit of a challenge to do upside-down at 2AM):

Yes, it is bigger on the inside. Y'know, to allow for the swelling.

Then I went to the Texas Library Association Annual Conference, where Neil Gaiman happened to be speaking on Saturday. At first, they told me he was just going to be speaking, since he's coming back on a book tour in a couple of months, but then he apparently decided to do an incredibly limited signing that you had to have a ticket to get into. There were 100 tickets—total—for like 7000 librarians, but I totally got the second-to-last one. WHICH LED TO THIS:

Neil Fucking Gaiman signed my cast. Also, yes, I'm pretty sure he took his wife's middle name.

After he signed it, he pulled out his phone and took a picture of it...which he then tweeted and posted on his Facebook page. Then he retweeted my reply to him (about a minute before he came on stage to speak). I posted a couple pictures of it to snark the tumblr. I also tweeted the pictures at The Bloggess and she told me I win the internets AND THEN SHE FOLLOWED ME!

So, for the rest of the afternoon, I'm having some kind of aneurysm of awesome, which is still going on when I go to watch my wife destroy everyone on the track and win Best Blocker in her roller derby bout. While I'm there, she skates over to me and tells me that another girl on her team follows the Doctor Who Official tumblr. Who fucking reblogged my post. And then so did Neil, who added "I was impressed." And Amanda Fucking Palmer. And about 7000 other people. And then I passed out because I couldn't fucking handle the amount of awesome that was happening all in one day.

Also, pretty much the entire conference knew who I was in the span of about 2 hours, and suddenly everybody wanted a picture. It was like the politest paparazzi ever. "Can I take a picture? Do you mind? Is it OK? Oh, thank you SO much! I/my daughter/son/coworker/friend/neighbor is SUCH a fan." Of Doctor Who, that is. Or Neil Gaiman. Probably not of me. Yet.

Hello, Sexy.

I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

Some days are just assholes. By the time you get out of bed, they've already been awake for hours, coming up with ways to be a dick to you. Especially Thursdays. It's like their entire purpose is to make goddamn sure you don't take Friday for granted. Last Thursday was one of them. It started out like every other day, with the strident noises at ass o'clock in the morning.

Every. Fucking. Day.

Then some boring shit happened. I took a shower and got dressed. While I was doing that, apparently Thursday went to hide in the kitchen and waited to jump out and punch me in the face.

The last thing I usually do before leaving for work is put out some food for the feral cat colony we inherited when we moved into our house. Our own cats are obsessed with the food that we give to the ferals, but one of them can't eat it because she has a "sensitive stomach," so she can only handle Science Diet Food For Cats With Expensive-Ass Digestive Conditions. The other one will try to eat literally anything she can get into her mouth (seriously, anything—even shit like cardboard). They had already managed to tear a hole in the bag by reaching under the laundry room door. When I went to carefully pick up the bag so it wouldn't spill, the Gobbler jumped up and tore the hole wide the fuck open.

It wasn't actually the Russian
Blue that tore the bag, but I can't
fucking draw the caliby. It was
totally a team effort anyway.

Then, while I was distracted by the Purina version of Exxon Valdez (for those of you under 30, that was Deepwater Horizon, but with a boat), my lunch went into stealth mode, or maybe it found an invisibility cloak. I don't know, but I totally forgot to grab it before going into White Rabbit Mode and running out the door shouting "I'm late!" to no one in particular.

In all fairness, it may have just been hiding from the Vader spatula.

Of course, I didn't realize it until I was almost all the way to work, so there was nothing I could do about it except hope that it hadn't gone bad by the time my wife went home for lunch.

Yes, my seatbelt is actually wider than my body. Safety first, motherfucker.

And then when I got to work, I was all pissed about forgetting my lunch, so I forgot to grab my keys and badge and had to go all the way back up to the third level of the parking garage to get them. When I finally got into the building, there were notes plastered all over the place that said that IT had done some kind of upgrade the night before and now basically nothing worked.

The note basically said "here are all the things that aren't
working today. It actually listed "Etc." as a bullet point.
Then it listed one or two more things after that, because
they don't know what "etc." means. Or "upgrade," apparently.

For some unfathomable reason, we still opened. After that, I spent pretty much the entire rest of the day pretending to be Scotty from Star Trek. Every time someone asked me for something, I was all "Ah cannae do that, Captain!" It probably helped that I was also wearing this button:

I'm not entirely certain whose reflection that is on the left, but
my money's on either the Grim Reaper or Emperor Palpatine.

It was even better since our catalog is actually called Enterprise, but probably you don't care because you don't work here. If you did, you wouldn't be reading this right now because you'd be too busy dealing with whatever asinine bullshit this Thursday was trying to pull.

Seriously, fuck Thursdays.

How to Read a Book (Without Being a Douchecanoe): A Primer.

The other day, I was telling a coworker how I had to make some "How to Read a Book" flowcharts, and she was all "What? Do you need one of those?" because apparently that's not a normal thing that people say, ever, so then I had to explain that it's for Banned Books Week, which is an annual reminder of the fact that there are some people who are so bad at reading books that when they're finished, nobody else is even allowed to read them anymore, and then after that, I had to come here and write one gigantic run-on sentence about the whole thing because I apparently have some kind of vendetta against proper punctuation today. Also, for those of you who aren't good with context clues, it's Banned Books Week, so I'm going to continue to subject you to librarian rants about intellectual freedom and not being a dick to everybody else just because you don't like something. I warned promised you yesterday that this was coming, and here it is. You should be impressed.

How to Read a Book (Without Being a Douchecanoe)

Part One: What to Do if You Read a Book You Don't Like

At some point in your life, you're probably going to encounter one of the following:

• A bound volume of pages containing printed text and images
• An electronic simulation of the aforementioned type of volume
• A sound recording of someone reading text from such a volume

These–along with other formats that create a similar user experience–are what we call books. This chart will help guide you through the process of interacting with them without fucking over the rest of society in the process:

If you can't read this, click to make it bigger. If you can't read it because you're illiterate,it probably doesn't apply to you anyway.

Part Two: Help! My Child Is Reading!

If you were here yesterday, you already know that half the time this bullshit happens, it's not even someone who actually read the book; it's because their kid read the book, and they just heard that there was something bad in it. Then, because they're arrogant dickwagons who think their parenting skills are infuckingfallible they care about the children, they decide that nobody should be allowed to read it, anywhere, ever, so they go on an asshat crusade to remove it from any place they can find it. Guess what? Not everyone shares your values. This chart will teach you how to instill them in your own children without being a dick about it to everybody else.

PROTIP: If you land in the red box, a good way to celebrate is by buying every copy you
can find of the book at full retail price and having a huge book bonfire on an actual yacht.

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And also ideas that we don't like. And albatrosses.

So, it's Banned Books Week, which means Librarian Rant, Motherfuckers!

Part One: Some Boring Statistics and Shit

First of all, there are probably quite a few people going "What? Ban books? This is America! Who the fuck does that shit anymore?"

Parents, mostly. Out of all the books that are ever challenged (read: bitched about in an attempt to ruin it for everybody), about half the time, it's parents who go "I don't want little Jimmy-Sue reading that; it's not wholesome!" Probably, they've never actually read the book themselves, but they heard it had a bad word in it or something. Then a bunch of other parents who haven't read it jump in and they form some kind of pitchfork mob and go storming into the next school board meeting demanding that the school board gets rid of the book, which probably they do. It never occurs to anybody to actually read the fucking thing, except maybe for the one part that somebody complained about, entirely out of context.

This is what happens roughly two-thirds of the time. Another quarter of the time, it's in a public library rather than a school, and they go to the local news rather than the school board, so that everybody can get all worked up over how those damn godless liberals are trying to corrupt the children with their books.

Part Two: "You can't read that! I don't like it!"

This is essentially the same as trying to get a McDonald's shut down because you're on a diet. Nobody forced you to go there, asshole.

Hey, let's all be afraid of ideas, because we wouldn't want to expose ourselves or our children to situations where they might have to fucking think! Also, let's ban mentioning anything unpleasant because knowing that something exists basically guarantees that you're immediately going to go and do it. This is why the media only ever report positive, life-affirming stories, and avoid topics like murder and armed robbery and war.

Here's an idea: parent, for fuck's sake. (Just your own kids, though—don't try to force your prudish bullshit values on everybody else.)

Part Three: Because of Reasons

There is a whole list of reasons why people try to get books banned. Usually, the actual content gets lumped under some generic term that does a shitty job of describing what you're missing out on. Fortunately, I've translated them for you so you can understand what's actually going on. You're welcome.

The top three reasons account for about half of all the books that get banned. I've listed them in order:

Sexually Explicit: The book acknowledges in any way that sex not only exists, but is something that people a) actually enjoy, and b) can do without a legally-binding contract. (cf. Sex Education)

Offensive Language means that one or more of the characters speaks a language other than English. (OK, that's not true. Actually, it means that the book contains certain combinations of syllables referring to parts or functions of the body which, when uttered or printed on a page, summon Satan to rip out your soul and defecate in the resultant void.)

Unsuited to Age Group: Occasionally, this means that somebody found a copy of the Kama Sutra in an elementary school's library. Usually, though, it means that the book's subject matter undermines parents' efforts to prevent their children from growing up by keeping them as innocent and oblivious as a six-year-old.

The rest I've done alphabetically. They are:

Abortion means that a character has or considers one, with little or no damnation as a consequence.

Anti-Family: 1) One or more of the characters in the book calls his or her parent on some kind of bullshit like abandoning all responsibility and forcing their children to take care of basically everything; 2) The book implies that a family can be defined as anything other than the "traditional" model of two heterosexual parents who were married in a church before ever having sex, and their legitimate offspring.

Homosexuality means that gay characters are referred to by names like "Jim" or "Steve," rather than "faggot," and are depicted doing normal-people things like going to work, rather than dying of AIDS and burning in Hell for all eternity.

Inaccurate means "I don't like what you wrote about me, even if it's true."

Nudity means that—you know what? I don't know what the fuck they mean by nudity. Maybe it mentions that somebody is naked in the book? Or describes body parts? How the fuck do you have nudity in print? Like an ASCII penis? This may be one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of.

The Occult, or Satanism: This means that either one of the characters is an atheist, or that somebody performs some kind of magic without explicitly invoking the name of Jesus.

Political Viewpoint means "not mine."

Racism denotes that the book depicts white people behaving in a racist manner. This is offensive because racism totally doesn't exist anymore, and mentioning it might inadvertently summon it back again (sort of like Beetlejuice or Bloody Mary), which would force white people–even the ones who have black friends–to prove that they're not racist.

Sex Education means that the book explains to anyone under the age of 30 that babies are not actually dumped down your chimney by a mystical love albatross, but instead come from having sex. It may or may not also explain that there are means to prevent this from happening other than eternal celibacy.

Suicide means that a character ends his or her own life, and that the rest of the book does not depict their eternal torment in the seventh circle of Dante's Inferno, but rather shows the other characters attempting to deal with the aftermath of the suicide.

Violence actually does just mean violence. It's the same shit they show all over TV, but more dangerous in print because reading actually engages the parts of your brain responsible for imagination, while TV encourages your brain to shut down; therefore, reading about violence makes people more likely to commit violence.

So that's censorship, to the best of my understanding. Come back tomorrow and I'll bitch about it some more teach you how not to be a dick to everybody else just because you read something you didn't like.

I'm not sure you've grasped the concept.

This conversation just happened:

Guy Calling Library: Do you take community service there?
Me: We do accept volunteers, but you have to apply through the City, and they won't allow anything court-ordered at the library. For that, they're going to make you do roadside cleanup or janitorial shit. You can find all that information on the City website.
GCL: Ah. It's just that it would be really convenient for me to do it at the library because I live in the apartments just across the parking lot. Actually, I'm looking at your building right now.

First of all, this is in no way fucking creepy, Dude Who Has Already Been Convicted Of Doing Something Illegal. Would you like me to go to the window and wave my arms or describe what I'm wearing so you can tell me that you can see what I'm doing?

Secondly, I do sincerely apologize for the inconvenience of your fucking sentence. I know that it's meant to be a pleasant and rewarding experience, and this is clearly in stark contrast to the section of the Penal Code that states:

§ When an individual is convicted of an offence against the Community, the sentence shall consist of a reasonably low number of hours of pleasurable service to the Community in a comfortable location convenient to the individual's place of residence.

Had you called even an hour sooner, the City may still have had a community service opening in the Getting A Blowjob From A Supermodel department. Again, I'm very sorry. Asshat.

Everything is fine. Nothing is ruined.

This isn't a real post, but I drew this after I worked last weekend because this happens every time I work a weekend. It's like there's some kind of Saturday bomb.

"I don't know where that fuckin' book is, man. It could be anywhere. There's a lot of 'em about!"