Non-Surly Thursday (with a tiny pocket of Surly in the middle)

 If I DO get Covid I guess it will be slightly ironic, because I felt really good this week after my week-end away. 

It was sunny and cold this morning. I was wearing a knit dress with a vest, my Docs and socks instead of tights because I am always so hot and uncomfortable in this library. I put a light cardigan over top mostly so people wouldn't comment on my wearing no kind of jacket at all.

I walked down the hall and was about to enter the library when a teacher leading a group of students said "are those postage stamps on your back?", which confused the hell out of me because as far as I know there was nothing on my back but black cardigan. I said "no?" and she said, "oh, it looks like it from a distance". I went into the library, plunked down all my stuff and took off my cardigan to look at the back. Since my Docs have started carving up my heels I wear blister patches a lot of the time, and they have an annoying habit of falling off and ending up everywhere, so I was worried there were blister patches stuck to my sweater. But there was nothing.

Then my eyes fell on my bags and I suddenly realized she was saying "on your BAG", not "on your BACK". At the beginning of the year I didn't have a tote bag big enough to carry my lumbar support cushion and a fan and my water bottle and lunch bag. I was trying to figure out where to look for one, and then I remembered Redbubble. So then Matt came home and I was on the computer and I told him that unfortunately I was about to buy four hundred dollars worth of tote bags because when you put almost anything you can think of on a tote bag it can be hard to narrow down the options.

For obvious reasons, I usually default to putting stuff about books or authors on my bags and t-shirts and phone cases and journals and socks and everything else. Then sometimes I feel like I want to branch out a little. I loved my old phone case, but it didn't fit my new phone. 

My new phone case is called Vintage Books, but is mainly a cute little robot. 

So after pages and pages of possible tote bag designs, I ended up with Virginia Woolf book covers

But also something called The Cuckoo and The Donkey. 

I dunno, shut up, it spoke to me.

So anyway I had to go out in the hallway and find the teacher and explain the misunderstanding because I felt like I must have appeared brainless. She was gracious.

My first two classes were really  nice as always, which lulled me into a false sense of serenity for the third class to come in and be absolutely heinous. They frequently are, but today was especially bad -  maybe because of the approaching holidays, maybe Mercury was in retrograde, but as my friend Hannah (HI HANNAH) said, there is just a particularly toxic mix of personalities and it makes for a really unpleasant half hour. I tried being reasonable. I tried being angry. I tried being very angry (actually by this point I just was, in fact, very angry). Then we had a secure schools notification so they had to stay even longer. Just when I thought we might have to resort to some of fight-club method of deciding who got to stay in the school and who had to hit the road, they were allowed to leave. I was in fight-or-flight for a good twenty minutes afterwards. The other librarian said we'll discuss it next week and if they don't improve she'll switch them to one of her days, but I don't want to inflict them on someone else. I just want to get better at dealing with them. When I used to waitress, I was terrible at not internalizing every negative interaction. Every now and then I think that if I tried that job now I'd be better at not taking everything so personally. Days like this show that I am most emphatically incorrect about that. 

My last class wasn't able to come because of the lockdown which was a little sad because I love them and there's no circulation next week but I did some shelving to calm down. Sometimes I sort the books into their categories to avoid a bunch of extra steps and get shelving done faster. Sometimes I just take an armful and sort of amble around from section to section according to what the next book is, and I feel very calm and librarian-ish doing it.

In the evening I went to Costco and Indigo with Jody (HI JODY) and did an epic singalong to All I Want for Christmas in the car and that was fabulous. 

Oh, and to round out the whole good things/bad things part of the day, on the way TO school there was a parked car making one street difficult to traverse. I pulled over to let one car go by, and then another car came around the corner quite quickly, so I expected her to go too, but she pulled right over to the curb so I could go next, in a lovely "aren't we all so courteous and civilized" moment. Then on the way home one car swerved suddenly and bashed into a car in the next lane two cars in front of me, resulting in a dramatic strewing of wheels and car parts all over the road, but miraculously no one was hurt and the collision was confined to those two cars. 

I started this post on Thursday and then got really tired, so it is now Sunday but I didn't get Covid! Even though Zarah and I totally sucked on the same weed pen Saturday night! I got to go to the Christmas party!