Imagine this expanded and surrounded by coffee cups and wineglasses, and you will know how I live.
Besides the usual crap for school (I took a math test! I read things about old people dying!), last week I…
Finished:
- EVERYTHING I NEEDED TO KNOW ABOUT BEING A GIRL I LEARNED FROM JUDY BLUME, ed. by Jennifer O’Connell.
- …and nothing else. Hence: series.
And am now reading this week:
- FROM A TO X by John Berger. Adult fiction, which: break from habit! It’s a weird story — told in letters to an imprisoned insurgent from his lover, with the insurgent’s odd marginalia — but I’m enjoying it. I like the lover’s character; that’s the only thing I’ve gotten a feel for so far.
- SEXUALITY AND SOCIALISM by Sherry Wolf. Brand new and totally awesome, but then, I’m biased because it’s by a friend. But I’ve been waiting for this book for years (years!), and now it’s here and I’m glad.
- LABOR WARS by Sidney Lens. This one’s for a book club. I’ve read a lot of labor history, but this one is still filling in gaps in my knowledge and is a lot livelier than many an academic history I have been fed.
- Notice what’s not on this list? Kids’ books. That’s because I’m having an unfortunate issue with Madison’s libraries involving their decision to send a hit man to break my legs for unpaid fines, which really I found rather ungenerous. Luckily, my advanced ninja sleight was able to put them off… for now. It’s possible I should resolve that situation. Alternatively, I could just scour my shelves again. Or (whispers) simply accept that despite all my determination not to buy so many books, some situations call for a visit to the bookstore… maybe the one right by the ice cream shop downtown… Already I am seeing a new path for my tomorrow afternoon.
-->Feed me text
July 5, 2009 at 8:25 pm
I also have had to pay big hefty fees to the library. Luckily they finally (6 months ago?) have email alerts in the system, so you can get an email 3 days before items are due now, which has helped my wallet tons.
July 5, 2009 at 9:42 pm
Yeah, what’s especially absurd is that I was using the damn library in the first place to save money, and instead… the perils of not knowing oneself.
July 6, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Ugh, I hate the library fines. I’ve started getting better about returns, still. I blame the fact that no one stamps books anymore–it’s all about those receipts that get lost and I have no idea when a book is due anymore.
July 6, 2009 at 4:40 pm
You know I’m all for an ice cream & bookstore afternoon. But I have to say 2 things:
1. You know you could, well, pay the fine. I know, not a particularly helpful or creative solution, but I figured someone should throw it out there.
2. What do you mean not knowing yourself? you must know yourself at least as well as I know you on this count, and I know tha this has happened to you repeatedly at various book-lending institutions. I seem to remember a certain technically-you-get-no-diploma-because-you’re-a-library-delinquent incident. Just saying.
July 6, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Emily: That wasn’t because of library fines, that was because I never recorded some of my service credit. (It will be amusing when I have a Ph.D., yet still no high school diploma.) (Notice the optimism of the previous parenthetical remark!) (Such optimism is what I meant about not knowing myself — I know I’ve continually had problems returning library books, and yet I always believe this time will be different. I don’t, apparently, know myself to discount such repeated, if sincerely felt, conviction that prior evidence is no guide to my future behavior.)
You may be thinking, instead, of how I had so many lost books on my public library card I gave up using it, so then I took out a different library card in a new name, then did the same thing on that card, and then finally after several years our friend Adam gave me a get-out-of-fines-free card for high school students only, and on the week I would’ve graduated (if not for said service credit issues), I finally eradicated the fines in the card under what was not then, but is now, my legal name. Sheesh, keep it straight.
July 7, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Ok, maybe I got it mixed up, but I do remember:
- You definitely still own books that belonged to our high school.
- A few years ago, when you were writing the article on political kids books, I took out a whole bunch of kids books for you on my card at the Donnell, because you had too many fines to use yours. (those, I will say, were returned fineless).
Ok, this has probably stopped being amusing to anyone but us.
July 7, 2009 at 4:03 pm
You definitely still own books that belonged to our high school.
Well, to be fair, their “incentive” to return the books was that if you didn’t, you wouldn’t get your report card, which… why didn’t it occur to them that the students who were inclined to be delinquent about returning books were probably also delinquent in ways that made receiving their report cards a rather depressing affair in any case?
Maybe what they really hadn’t bargained on, actually, was just how quickly my parents kind of gave up.
July 15, 2009 at 10:08 pm
[...] I’m still a little mystified by this book (which, no, I haven’t finished, and I’ll thank you to keep those kinds of questions to yourself), but one of the things I [...]