economy boost

I'm glad to see the hair pick industry is still thriving these days.

 My grandmother would be so proud.

Number or hair picks in use in the YA room at this moment: 3.

And there are only 6 people in here.

so they're not alive?

There's a woman who works here part-time and I have trouble figuring out what exactly her job is, other than trying to do other people's jobs.  She got into a huge argument with a temporary librarian my first week here and made the biggest deal of it and was smack talking this librarian to the other people working here.  Highly professional.  I do not care very much for this woman, because, again, I don't think she actually does her job and she keeps trying to interfere with mine.  She has roped kids into doing her work for her, she yells at the teens when I don't think they're doing anything wrong, and she's just kind of a busybody.

But, man, is she fascinated and confused by zombies.  Each month I have been setting up a display based on a theme for that month.  April is National Poetry Month, so I set up a display of poetry books in the YA section.  And this month, I was having trouble finding a good theme, until I read somewhere that May is Zombie Awareness Month.  I thought that was pretty awesome and something the kids might dig, so I collected a bunch of books and movies about zombies and set up my display.

Apparently, this woman has never heard of zombies before so every time she comes in she asks me more questions about them.  She doesn't understand that they are undead, confuses them with vampires, and asks me if this is something that kids like.  The questions have been going on for a month, and it's like talking to a 4 year old, I really don't know how to answer them anymore.  She keeps bringing me books and asks if they're about zombies.  Today she told me she did some research on them and found out that they come back from the dead and was so proud of herself for knowing that factoid.

It's just been a bit bizarre and she won't let it go, so I'm rather looking forward to May being over.  I hope my next display isn't as confusing.

What is a zombie?

bootylicious

I was just yelled at by an extremely agitated older male patron because two of the pictures of Beyonce that he had printed off of the internet did not print out as he wanted. 

I had a difficult time understanding what he wanted me to do.  It seemed that he wanted reimbursement for how the pictures came out, but as I was pretty sure they came out incorrectly due to user error and not through any fault of our equipment, I was not going to do that.  However, he was quick to inform me that he's got a $40,000 car out in the parking lot, he doesn't care about getting $1 back.  He was yelling at me and he wasn't happy when I said he needed to calm down or I would have to ask him to leave.  I said I would be happy to re-print his pictures, but when I went to do so, being guided by the website address printed on the bottom of the pages he had given me, he accused me of watching what he was doing on-line.

They weren't even naked pictures of Beyonce.  What was this dude getting so worked up over?  He must be crazy in love with her.

All right, I do understand why he was so worked up. Damn you, Beyonce, for putting us mere mortals to shame.

phrase origin

So I'm watching some 'Glee' last night, and at one point Kurt said the phrase "eat your heart out."  And this morning I woke up thinking about how disturbing a thing this is to say.  Seriously.  Think about it for a second.  I'll wait.

Gross.

I wanted to know the origin of this phrase, so I turned to the interwebs for help.  I'll tell ya, I wasn't thrilled with some of the answers.  A lot of people seem to think it has to do with eating a whole lot, but that sounds even grosser and I don't believe that's true at all.

The best definition came from Scorpio Tales - "The ancients believed that sorrow or envy were bad for the heart, and would eat away at it, each sigh draining blood from the organ. This idea made its way to England and became well established - Shakespeare often refers to it, as in, 'Might liquid tears, of heart-offending groans, / Or blood-consuming sighs recall his life, / I would be blind with weeping, sick with groans, / Look pale as primrose with blood-drinking sighs' (Henry VI, part 2, III.ii). We still describe someone as broken-hearted by grief. By the beginning of the 20th century, to eat your heart out was well-established as a term for pining; but more recently, it has also been used as a cry of triumph when someone else has cause to envy the speaker."

Not great, but hopefully it's enough to get my mind off the disturbing nature of it.

I'm having a difficult time choosing which picture to use for this post.  I don't want to look for pictures of people eating hearts.  Instead, as often happens when thinking hard about a particular word or phrase, it lost all meaning for me.  Which led me to this gem:

Glorious

fact #3

My family has been spending the February school vacation in Puerto Rico since I was a wee young thing.  We have had many a run-in with celebrities down there including Billy Baldwin and Chynna Phillips, George Hamilton, Paul Schaffer and Regis.  While we did do a great deal of the bonding with Billy and Chynna, my best encounter was with Kurt Vonnegut.

Judging by my horrific haircut in pictures from this trip, I was in 5th grade on this particular trip.  And I was at an age where I was good at making vacation friends, which is how I met Kurt's daughter, Lily.  We hung out at the pool and the game room, the usual.  And then one afternoon she asked if I wanted to play a game with her and her dad.  What game?  Oh, you know, just some Battleship.  No big whoop.  But I bet not many people can say that not only did they play Battleship against Kurt Vonnegut, but beat him at Battleship. 

I can't believe he didn't write a story about this event, it must have been a big day for him.

Sorry I sunk your Battleship, Mr. Vonnegut

kids these days...

...can't get enough of their Civil War comic books.

entrepreneur?

So, my cousin has been selling Mary Kay for a long time.  And as I'm always interested in ways to make a few extra dollars, I have been considering joining for a long time.  But I never did because I didn't think I would actually sell anything.  And I don't want to harass the people in my life to buy things for me.  But, I recently decided to give it a shot.  We'll see what happens, I am not expecting it to make me a millionaire, but when I talked it out with some people, there were basically zero reasons why I shouldn't give it a shot.  I'm, like, a little bit embarrassed by this whole thing, but I know I like product, and I like all the Mary Kay stuff I have used in the past, so hopefully I'll get over that.

If you'd like to check out my snazzy website, you should go here - http://www.marykay.com/mwithers-tong.

Someday, I hope to be able to cruise around in one of these:

Baller!

fact #2

This is a true story.

One weekend when I was working at Disney after college, some family friends came to visit the parks and I met up with them for the day at MGM - er, Disney's Hollywood Studios.  It happened to be Soap Opera Weekend at the park, so there was an abundance of all of our favorite soap stars.  They were actually a bit aggressive in trying to hand out pictures of these actors that I could later get autographed or something.  I'm actually not quite sure what goes on for Soap Opera Weekend.

Anyhoodle, my two friends and I go on the Rock 'N' Roller Coaster where Steven Tyler begs his manager to get us a super-stretch limo and backstage tickets to see their show.  Joe Perry came so close to forgetting his black Les Paul which would have been awful.  We blaze through the ride and arrive at the unloading area as well as the point of this story - as we are disembarking from our vehicles we notice a horse standing there.

We all take a glance at it and continue on our way.  As we're exiting the building I go, 'so, wait, was that a horse at the end there?'  The three of us agree that it sure looked like a horse.  We think about it some more and then begin asking our questions as to why there would be a horse in that building.  This discussion has continued on and off for the last 5 and 1/2 years.  Our various theories cover a wide range, from it being a seeing-eye pony, or perhaps some Soap Opera star had it in her contract to appear at the park that she would only travel around via horse.  Perhaps we had a group hallucination.  Or maybe it was just a crazy big dog.  Afterward, we were kicking ourselves that we didn't just ask someone why there was a horse at the unloading part of the ride.  And I know it is a question that has haunted me for years.

I looked for a long time - there are no pictures of horses on rollercoasters

unexpectedly awesome

I admit it, I jumped to a conclusion the other day when a group of girls who often give me a hard time asked if they could watch a movie in one of the study rooms.  I was prepared to have to look over the movie and make sure it wasn't something that I could get in trouble for showing.

Boy, was my face red when I they gave me the DVD case and I saw that it was season 1 of The Golden Girls. 

Perhaps I'm not as out of my element here as I thought.

Gangster