"A Child Could Go Quite Mad, and Not Know Good From Bad..."

I love working at the library. Truly I do. Is like another, quieter, slower world in suspended time, and it doesn't matter what's going on outside except that you're expected to talk about it with people at the desk, because that's being friendly, and it's good to be friendly with people.

To-day when Da' was driving me in I realised that we always turn off the highway to go to Newport, and I don't think I've ever, in my life, kept on going. It's not a very big highway, although most highways feel big to me. I really started wondering where you go if you keep going. I don't think it will really be as bad as I've been afraid, learning to drive. I don't think so. Especially when it's beautiful and darkish and rainy outside, and being in the car is secret and pulled-apart, especially if there's music playing. I tried to write a poem about that once, but I couldn't.

It amuses me that the Cliff Notes for Macbeth and Merchant of Venice are longer than those for Hamlet.

I'm so happy here. I'm so glad about the rain. It's good. We needed it so badly, and it's so good it came.

I truly do mean it about suspended time. I don't think anything bad could ever happen here, it's so out of the rest of everything. The worst that could happen could only be about books--people don't die, wars don't happen, there aren't famines and floods and storms and droughts inside a library. I'm in love.

On the other hand, people do keep bringing in wet books; but that's all right. I wish I had three more hours here, instead of only forty minutes.

I think you can always feel beautiful in a library, because you're a secret, and people aren't looking at you, and if you smile no one even thinks about you. They're just pleased enough that you say have a nice day! and mean it, and are quick and easy about checking out their books, and will talk about the weather or the dreadful water system in Newport.

And I'm in love, I'm in love, in the quietest suspended time way, because everything's a secret or it's smiling.

I'd better go out and shelve again. Is time.

<3

"Off to the Races, the Royal Races..."

So, let us say that you are starving to death, a slightly melodramatic term that can either refer to hyperbole and mean merely that you are extremely hungry, or else literalism and mean that you are truly going to die of hunger and lack of food.

Let us say that you are employing this term because you have not eaten in eight hours and everyone else is going to to a nice restaurant that you cannot go to because you are you and have your own situation; let us say also that you cannot eat anything at home, for some inconvenient reason, say, the power has gone out and all your dietary foodstuffs are rendered inedible when not cooked.

What, then, is your solution?

Apparently, hibernation.

You wake up three hours later and deduce, despite the darkness of your room, that the power is back on, due to the fact that your alarum clock is flashing a time roughly equivalent with 12:45 am.

What do you do now?

Come downstairs and have supper, for which you are about to die. Because you have slept all this time, you have fourteen points left, and thus treat yourself to an entire chicken breast, for the first time in a while, an apple you discover hidden somewhere, two slices of dietary bread hidden in the back of the refrigerator, an entire pot of frozen yellow beans, and, because you still have seven points left after all of this, a very small bag of dietary potato chips.

Thus, having eaten something at long last, and feeling rather as though you truly have been starving to death and cannot believe you've finally obtained food, you creep into the next room, log on to the computer, and proceed to make a post detailing the incident in the most pretentious terms, despite the fact that there is nothing even remotely remarkable about it.

Except that now you know how hibernation works. When there's no food, you go to sleep! Simple.

Also you have discovered that you are an idiot.

"Land of the Rocky Shore, I Will Return Once More..."

Beware of massive Blue Mountain Lake picspam, and let's hear it for the gratuitous Soujin! ^___^ Piiiiicspam!

( Home of the silver birch, land of the beaver...* )

And that's all. We return you to your regularly scheduled programmes! ^____^