I always get a pastry when I go to Starbucks, and only God can judge me for that. I like pastries.
But the other day, I went to Starbucks and the girl who got my pastry out put it in a bag and handed it to the guy who was going to charge me, and he (not having seen its retrieval) thought it would be cute to try to guess what it was by feeling the bag. Now I understand that this is hardly an outrage on the level of being fondled by TSA, but watching what should have been a sweet and delicious breakfast get palpated by some sweaty stranger who thought he was being funny pretty much ruined my morning. It was a scone, by the way, and there was icing on it. I try to make it a point never to be rude to cashiers because I assume they all hate their jobs and I don't need to make it worse, but my, “Hey. Next time, just fucking ask me what's in there,” did not feel inappropriate. Especially because (did I mention?) he didn't know that the bag contained a scone, because he had refused to take my order (“She'll take care of you”), even though he had been free when I got to the head of the line and he knew all along he was going to have to ring me up.
You don't need to start platituding at me; I know that if this kind of thing is the worst problem I have, my life is probably pretty all right. And it is. But the cut is especially deep because the particular Starbucks location where I suffered this indignity was, up until very recently, a place I looked on with great fondness. I might even go so far as to say it was a refuge for me. Therein lies the sad, ill soul of my generation, right there.
I thought of. Starbucks. As a refuge.
Mostly it was just that one specific Starbucks; it's a block away from my job and all the employees there were surprisingly smart and competent. I could tell when they were having their off days, but I wasn't their only regular, and several of the staff would greet multiple customers (including me) by name. I always ordered the same drink, and there were a couple of times when I went in during a lull and they actually had my drink ready for me before I got to the counter. When life was rough, and it was early and the weather was bad and I felt battered from my public transit commute, I knew that I could go into Starbucks and somebody would smile at me and make me a pretty drink.
But that all changed in October. They shut down that Starbucks location. It wasn't permanent, just for a couple of weeks while they remodeled the place, so nobody worried. This is Brentwood! There are plenty of other places in the neighborhood to grab a morning beverage, and who doesn't love a good remodeling? People remodel their faces here, they love it so much.
Starbucks lost no customers by being closed for two weeks. I went back in as soon as they reopened and it was as crowded as ever. One of my old acquaintances from pRe-modeling days was working, and we had a nice chat, and all seemed to be well. Which may have been why it took me so long to notice that all the rest of the staff had changed. I thought that all my favorite, multi-ethnic hipster baristas were simply not working when I showed up, for a while. But it gradually became clear that I would never see them again. They had not been supplemented by a couple of new employees, they had been totally replaced by the moon-faced white guys in their mid- to late thirties who sang disco music while they mixed my drink in the wrong proportion, and didn't wait for the line to thin out before they decided to restock the fridge bar. One of them even introduced himself to me one morning, in a strange, forced, Dale Carnegie kind of way. So you have to understand, the scone palpitation incident was not an isolated case of bad judgment. It was the last straw in a string of indignities.
And now I find myself at a crossroads. I feel that continuing to patronize this Starbucks location can bring me nothing but sorrow and frustration. I have other options, as mentioned, but for some reason most of the drinks at Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf taste a little bit slimy to me, and Peet's has the best pastries hands down but I dislike the feeling I get there of being raped by my coffee (it may be a bit late to point this out, but I am actually not a coffee drinker. My beverage of choice is a green tea lemonade, which neither Peet's nor the Coffee Bean have on offer). Also, the local Peet's has virtually no place to sit.
I suppose I could make a drink at home in the morning, or not, and skip the whole beverage-purchasing part of the morning, saving myself both money and time. But the drink was never the point. The point of going to Starbucks, for me, was that whether I was in a hurry or I had to kill time before work, I knew that someone would smile at me and give me a nice treat, and maybe ask about something that didn't matter, like whether I was in a play, or if I had a vacation coming up, and I didn't have to worry about what I said because my entire relationship with this person was being played out right there in the Starbucks. No feelings, no commitments, no possibility of insult or injury. Just some lemonade and a pastry. It was my five minutes of Utopia.
And now it has been replaced, by a fat pastry molester.
Aurora Nibley lives in North Hollywood with her husband and cat. She used to write about football, but gave that shit up. If you want to look at the things she Tweets, find your way on over to http://twitter.com/auroranibley
Showing posts with label Aurora Nibley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aurora Nibley. Show all posts
Monday, January 3, 2011
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Best of 2010: Aurora Nibley - Spine vs. Spine - Espionage in the Stacks
I don't know her name. No one knows her name; none of us can even remember whether she ever told us. All we know is that she comes in to the public library twice a week, with her ill-fitting jeans and her overbite, and she's nothing but trouble.
She's not the only incompetent volunteer the library's ever seen, she's just the most consistent. Usually the ones who don't know what they're doing are kids who need school credit. They come in once or twice and don't have the opportunity to do a lot of damage. Alternatively, our “regulars” tend to be older, and have a firm grasp of alphabetical organization.
This woman appears to be in her early fifties, although it's difficult to tell. She obviously immigrated to the US from a Central Asian country, India or Pakistan, but exactly which one is also mysterious. She wears her hair in one long braid down her back, as most women from that part of the world seem to do (her hair is black but her roots are gray—I see that a lot in Asian women, do they dye their hair or does it grow out that way when they get older?), but her clothes are western, obviously cheap and badly sized; she has neither the Hindu forehead dot nor the Muslim head covering, so there are no clues about her life there, either. We literally know nothing about her except that she's a walking apologetic smile of incompetence.
When she first came in over a year ago, we started her off with audio/visual materials. We keep these only loosely alphabetized and most people find them to be the simplest items to shelve. But we soon noticed that she couldn't tell the difference between regular audio books and teen audio books (the teen audio books are marked with a large blue dot on the spine—even if you're colorblind, you can see the giant dots) and would consistently put the teen materials in with the adult materials. When we tried to gently correct her, she switched to putting the adult stuff in with the teen stuff, which was worse. She does not take well to instruction, either; if you repeat an instruction (and she realizes it's something she's been told before), she gets huffy, declares that she has a college education, and sulks. But she never leaves.
What we can't figure out about her, aside from everything, is why she wants to volunteer at the library at all. One of our clerks told me that her family just brings her and leaves her here twice a week, to force her to get out of the house (For her sake? Or theirs? Again, unclear). But if that was all it is, she could sit with a magazine for a couple of hours, or use the public internet. Instead, for reasons known maybe only to herself, she wants to be helpful. My theory is that she somehow got the idea that shelving books at the library would help her to improve her English language skills. This might be the case, if she were reading the English books or conversing with English-speaking people. Instead, she is bringing me books marked with the letter F, because they were written by, say, Jonathan Franzen, or Ford Madox Ford, and asking me where she should put them because she doesn't know where the books go that are written in French—which, admittedly, also begins with F.
My personal relationship with her has evolved since we've known each other. At first, I was happy to show her around and explain where everything was supposed to go. I didn't mind answering her questions. Asking questions is how you learn, after all. But after the third or fourth time she would ask me the same question and then get offended at the phrase, “Remember when I told you...”, she gave up asking me. And shortly afterward, when I realized she would just ignore me if I came to help her unsolicited, we basically reached a silent agreement to ignore each other. Except that she hasn't figured out how to walk around a bookshelf if someone is in her way, so if we're working in the same area at the same time, I end up getting squeezed past far more often than is comfortable for me. Which is to say, at all.
Now she and I are at a stalemate. The librarians refuse to ask her not to come back (their philosophy being that any volunteers are better than none, which would make sense of we didn't have a couple of dozen others to choose from), so they keep just trying to think of different new tasks that she might not fuck up. But she always finds a way. She's wily. She kept putting books in the wrong place, so they asked her to put the books on the shelf with the spines facing up instead of out so that we can check them when she's done. But after about one day, she learned to only face the spines upward when she knows the book is in the right place—if she's not sure, she puts it in normally. She thinks that by doing this we won't be able to figure out that she's the one making all the mistakes. But we did. We thought that maybe she was getting things wrong because English is not her first language (although no one knows what is), and so maybe she's just having trouble with the alphabet. I wouldn't trust myself to alphabetize correctly in Greek, or Chinese. So we asked her to put the non-fiction books in order, because they are arranged numerically. For some reason she's not into that, though, so she does about a third to half of the numerical arranging (usually poorly), and then goes back to fucking up the alphabet again.
I myself have been reduced to following her from a distance while she's in the library, like some kind of crazy detective. If I try to do my own work, she'll take the books I'm working with and put them out of order, or she'll trip over me trying to walk through a narrow passage instead of going around. If I get too close to what she's doing, she gets super defensive and offended. All I can do is trail far enough behind her to hope she doesn't notice, and repair the damage.
I wonder how I could suggest that she'd rather volunteer at the UCLA library?
She's not the only incompetent volunteer the library's ever seen, she's just the most consistent. Usually the ones who don't know what they're doing are kids who need school credit. They come in once or twice and don't have the opportunity to do a lot of damage. Alternatively, our “regulars” tend to be older, and have a firm grasp of alphabetical organization.
This woman appears to be in her early fifties, although it's difficult to tell. She obviously immigrated to the US from a Central Asian country, India or Pakistan, but exactly which one is also mysterious. She wears her hair in one long braid down her back, as most women from that part of the world seem to do (her hair is black but her roots are gray—I see that a lot in Asian women, do they dye their hair or does it grow out that way when they get older?), but her clothes are western, obviously cheap and badly sized; she has neither the Hindu forehead dot nor the Muslim head covering, so there are no clues about her life there, either. We literally know nothing about her except that she's a walking apologetic smile of incompetence.
When she first came in over a year ago, we started her off with audio/visual materials. We keep these only loosely alphabetized and most people find them to be the simplest items to shelve. But we soon noticed that she couldn't tell the difference between regular audio books and teen audio books (the teen audio books are marked with a large blue dot on the spine—even if you're colorblind, you can see the giant dots) and would consistently put the teen materials in with the adult materials. When we tried to gently correct her, she switched to putting the adult stuff in with the teen stuff, which was worse. She does not take well to instruction, either; if you repeat an instruction (and she realizes it's something she's been told before), she gets huffy, declares that she has a college education, and sulks. But she never leaves.
What we can't figure out about her, aside from everything, is why she wants to volunteer at the library at all. One of our clerks told me that her family just brings her and leaves her here twice a week, to force her to get out of the house (For her sake? Or theirs? Again, unclear). But if that was all it is, she could sit with a magazine for a couple of hours, or use the public internet. Instead, for reasons known maybe only to herself, she wants to be helpful. My theory is that she somehow got the idea that shelving books at the library would help her to improve her English language skills. This might be the case, if she were reading the English books or conversing with English-speaking people. Instead, she is bringing me books marked with the letter F, because they were written by, say, Jonathan Franzen, or Ford Madox Ford, and asking me where she should put them because she doesn't know where the books go that are written in French—which, admittedly, also begins with F.
My personal relationship with her has evolved since we've known each other. At first, I was happy to show her around and explain where everything was supposed to go. I didn't mind answering her questions. Asking questions is how you learn, after all. But after the third or fourth time she would ask me the same question and then get offended at the phrase, “Remember when I told you...”, she gave up asking me. And shortly afterward, when I realized she would just ignore me if I came to help her unsolicited, we basically reached a silent agreement to ignore each other. Except that she hasn't figured out how to walk around a bookshelf if someone is in her way, so if we're working in the same area at the same time, I end up getting squeezed past far more often than is comfortable for me. Which is to say, at all.
Now she and I are at a stalemate. The librarians refuse to ask her not to come back (their philosophy being that any volunteers are better than none, which would make sense of we didn't have a couple of dozen others to choose from), so they keep just trying to think of different new tasks that she might not fuck up. But she always finds a way. She's wily. She kept putting books in the wrong place, so they asked her to put the books on the shelf with the spines facing up instead of out so that we can check them when she's done. But after about one day, she learned to only face the spines upward when she knows the book is in the right place—if she's not sure, she puts it in normally. She thinks that by doing this we won't be able to figure out that she's the one making all the mistakes. But we did. We thought that maybe she was getting things wrong because English is not her first language (although no one knows what is), and so maybe she's just having trouble with the alphabet. I wouldn't trust myself to alphabetize correctly in Greek, or Chinese. So we asked her to put the non-fiction books in order, because they are arranged numerically. For some reason she's not into that, though, so she does about a third to half of the numerical arranging (usually poorly), and then goes back to fucking up the alphabet again.
I myself have been reduced to following her from a distance while she's in the library, like some kind of crazy detective. If I try to do my own work, she'll take the books I'm working with and put them out of order, or she'll trip over me trying to walk through a narrow passage instead of going around. If I get too close to what she's doing, she gets super defensive and offended. All I can do is trail far enough behind her to hope she doesn't notice, and repair the damage.
I wonder how I could suggest that she'd rather volunteer at the UCLA library?
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Aurora Nibley: Rain
I warned him not to go out in the rain. I told him it wasn't safe, but he didn't understand. Sometimes I think he didn't want to understand.
He would sit at the window on rainy days, looking out at the world like he was hypnotized. If any other children passed by outside, he would fuss, and when he was feeling fractious he couldn't seem to help being difficult with me.
“Why is it all right for them to be in the rain? Nothing bad is happening to them.”
“No, darling, but you aren't like them. You must stay inside when it rains. Don't worry. You're safe here with me.”
“I'm not worried! I just want to know. Why is the rain bad?”
“It just isn't good for you. You'll understand when you're older.”
“I want to know now. Is it bad to get wet? I get wet in the bath, you know. I take baths all the time.”
“Baths are safe, dear. There is no reason to worry about the bath.”
“What about the shower? That's like rain.”
“I can see how you might think so, but you are wrong. A shower is completely different from the rain. The shower is safe.”
“So what is safe and what is not safe? Is it because the rain is outside? We go outside on sunny days.”
“There is nothing to be afraid of on sunny days. The garden is a good place to be on a sunny day. Would you like to walk in the garden tomorrow?”
“I want to go to the garden now. Why don't we ever do what I want to do?”
“Because you don't know what's good for you and I do. Tomorrow, if it's not raining, we can walk in the garden, but today we must stay in the house.”
He was always happy outside. It worried me, even though I loved to see him happy. I knew what it meant and I knew I would never be able to stop it. But I did try. I built such a wonderful garden for us, for him. I created beautiful geometric hedges and flowerbeds, with gravel pathways and even—against my better judgment--a few trees large enough for him to climb. Plants are very safe, if you're willing to work with them. I couldn't keep the animals out, but I tried not to worry; the ones that he actually saw were so small, just birds and insects. The butterflies really did worry me, but the bees were a reassuring presence. Everything was in its place and happy, everything was controlled, everything was safe. So all I ever really needed to worry about was the weather.
The day I lost him didn't even start out sunny; it was grey from sunrise on and I should have known better than to go out. But it had been sunny for weeks and the morning clouds looked wispy and weak, and I knew form experience that even if the weather got worse, he would be easier to deal with if he got a short walk outside than none at all. So I bundled him up, to cover as much of his skin as possible, and we went out at our usual time.
It was warmer in the garden than it had looked from indoors, almost muggy, and he pulled his hat off right away and dropped it a moment later. Already I was beginning to have a bad feeling about what might happen, and as I replaced it I was sharper with him than I should have been.
“You must, you must wear your hat today! Don't take it off again!”
“I'm not cold! I won't wear it!”
He yanked it off of his head and threw it away from him, into the hedges. At the same time, he took off running, away from me, and worse, away from the house. If I had gone right after him I probably could have caught him, but the hat distracted me for just a split second and it was enough for him to get a few yards' head start. Within moments, the chase had become a game for him, and he laughed as he ran, evading me, pulling off his clothes.
We were almost at the far end of the garden when the rain started. There was absolutely no hope. Every drop that touched his skin reminded him of what he really was, and in no time at all he was soaked through, a wild thing, and not mine at all. He was still running, but he didn't care whether I chased him or not. I don't know if he remembered I was even there. He belonged to the rain, and the woods, and the wilderness, and he was going to run.
I didn't see where he ran.
I went back home, and I shut the door, and I locked it. I couldn't have anything that dangerous in my house.
Aurora Nibley lives in Hollywood with her husband and cat. She writes about football of all things over at http://writingthebench.blogspot.com, and you can Twitter her to your heart's delight over at http://twitter.com/AuroraNibley
He would sit at the window on rainy days, looking out at the world like he was hypnotized. If any other children passed by outside, he would fuss, and when he was feeling fractious he couldn't seem to help being difficult with me.
“Why is it all right for them to be in the rain? Nothing bad is happening to them.”
“No, darling, but you aren't like them. You must stay inside when it rains. Don't worry. You're safe here with me.”
“I'm not worried! I just want to know. Why is the rain bad?”
“It just isn't good for you. You'll understand when you're older.”
“I want to know now. Is it bad to get wet? I get wet in the bath, you know. I take baths all the time.”
“Baths are safe, dear. There is no reason to worry about the bath.”
“What about the shower? That's like rain.”
“I can see how you might think so, but you are wrong. A shower is completely different from the rain. The shower is safe.”
“So what is safe and what is not safe? Is it because the rain is outside? We go outside on sunny days.”
“There is nothing to be afraid of on sunny days. The garden is a good place to be on a sunny day. Would you like to walk in the garden tomorrow?”
“I want to go to the garden now. Why don't we ever do what I want to do?”
“Because you don't know what's good for you and I do. Tomorrow, if it's not raining, we can walk in the garden, but today we must stay in the house.”
He was always happy outside. It worried me, even though I loved to see him happy. I knew what it meant and I knew I would never be able to stop it. But I did try. I built such a wonderful garden for us, for him. I created beautiful geometric hedges and flowerbeds, with gravel pathways and even—against my better judgment--a few trees large enough for him to climb. Plants are very safe, if you're willing to work with them. I couldn't keep the animals out, but I tried not to worry; the ones that he actually saw were so small, just birds and insects. The butterflies really did worry me, but the bees were a reassuring presence. Everything was in its place and happy, everything was controlled, everything was safe. So all I ever really needed to worry about was the weather.
The day I lost him didn't even start out sunny; it was grey from sunrise on and I should have known better than to go out. But it had been sunny for weeks and the morning clouds looked wispy and weak, and I knew form experience that even if the weather got worse, he would be easier to deal with if he got a short walk outside than none at all. So I bundled him up, to cover as much of his skin as possible, and we went out at our usual time.
It was warmer in the garden than it had looked from indoors, almost muggy, and he pulled his hat off right away and dropped it a moment later. Already I was beginning to have a bad feeling about what might happen, and as I replaced it I was sharper with him than I should have been.
“You must, you must wear your hat today! Don't take it off again!”
“I'm not cold! I won't wear it!”
He yanked it off of his head and threw it away from him, into the hedges. At the same time, he took off running, away from me, and worse, away from the house. If I had gone right after him I probably could have caught him, but the hat distracted me for just a split second and it was enough for him to get a few yards' head start. Within moments, the chase had become a game for him, and he laughed as he ran, evading me, pulling off his clothes.
We were almost at the far end of the garden when the rain started. There was absolutely no hope. Every drop that touched his skin reminded him of what he really was, and in no time at all he was soaked through, a wild thing, and not mine at all. He was still running, but he didn't care whether I chased him or not. I don't know if he remembered I was even there. He belonged to the rain, and the woods, and the wilderness, and he was going to run.
I didn't see where he ran.
I went back home, and I shut the door, and I locked it. I couldn't have anything that dangerous in my house.
Aurora Nibley lives in Hollywood with her husband and cat. She writes about football of all things over at http://writingthebench.blogspot.com, and you can Twitter her to your heart's delight over at http://twitter.com/AuroraNibley
Monday, October 4, 2010
Aurora Nibley: Spine vs. Spine - Espionage in the Stacks
I don't know her name. No one knows her name; none of us can even remember whether she ever told us. All we know is that she comes in to the public library twice a week, with her ill-fitting jeans and her overbite, and she's nothing but trouble.
She's not the only incompetent volunteer the library's ever seen, she's just the most consistent. Usually the ones who don't know what they're doing are kids who need school credit. They come in once or twice and don't have the opportunity to do a lot of damage. Alternatively, our “regulars” tend to be older, and have a firm grasp of alphabetical organization.
This woman appears to be in her early fifties, although it's difficult to tell. She obviously immigrated to the US from a Central Asian country, India or Pakistan, but exactly which one is also mysterious. She wears her hair in one long braid down her back, as most women from that part of the world seem to do (her hair is black but her roots are gray—I see that a lot in Asian women, do they dye their hair or does it grow out that way when they get older?), but her clothes are western, obviously cheap and badly sized; she has neither the Hindu forehead dot nor the Muslim head covering, so there are no clues about her life there, either. We literally know nothing about her except that she's a walking apologetic smile of incompetence.
When she first came in over a year ago, we started her off with audio/visual materials. We keep these only loosely alphabetized and most people find them to be the simplest items to shelve. But we soon noticed that she couldn't tell the difference between regular audio books and teen audio books (the teen audio books are marked with a large blue dot on the spine—even if you're colorblind, you can see the giant dots) and would consistently put the teen materials in with the adult materials. When we tried to gently correct her, she switched to putting the adult stuff in with the teen stuff, which was worse. She does not take well to instruction, either; if you repeat an instruction (and she realizes it's something she's been told before), she gets huffy, declares that she has a college education, and sulks. But she never leaves.
What we can't figure out about her, aside from everything, is why she wants to volunteer at the library at all. One of our clerks told me that her family just brings her and leaves her here twice a week, to force her to get out of the house (For her sake? Or theirs? Again, unclear). But if that was all it is, she could sit with a magazine for a couple of hours, or use the public internet. Instead, for reasons known maybe only to herself, she wants to be helpful. My theory is that she somehow got the idea that shelving books at the library would help her to improve her English language skills. This might be the case, if she were reading the English books or conversing with English-speaking people. Instead, she is bringing me books marked with the letter F, because they were written by, say, Jonathan Franzen, or Ford Madox Ford, and asking me where she should put them because she doesn't know where the books go that are written in French—which, admittedly, also begins with F.
My personal relationship with her has evolved since we've known each other. At first, I was happy to show her around and explain where everything was supposed to go. I didn't mind answering her questions. Asking questions is how you learn, after all. But after the third or fourth time she would ask me the same question and then get offended at the phrase, “Remember when I told you...”, she gave up asking me. And shortly afterward, when I realized she would just ignore me if I came to help her unsolicited, we basically reached a silent agreement to ignore each other. Except that she hasn't figured out how to walk around a bookshelf if someone is in her way, so if we're working in the same area at the same time, I end up getting squeezed past far more often than is comfortable for me. Which is to say, at all.
Now she and I are at a stalemate. The librarians refuse to ask her not to come back (their philosophy being that any volunteers are better than none, which would make sense of we didn't have a couple of dozen others to choose from), so they keep just trying to think of different new tasks that she might not fuck up. But she always finds a way. She's wily. She kept putting books in the wrong place, so they asked her to put the books on the shelf with the spines facing up instead of out so that we can check them when she's done. But after about one day, she learned to only face the spines upward when she knows the book is in the right place—if she's not sure, she puts it in normally. She thinks that by doing this we won't be able to figure out that she's the one making all the mistakes. But we did. We thought that maybe she was getting things wrong because English is not her first language (although no one knows what is), and so maybe she's just having trouble with the alphabet. I wouldn't trust myself to alphabetize correctly in Greek, or Chinese. So we asked her to put the non-fiction books in order, because they are arranged numerically. For some reason she's not into that, though, so she does about a third to half of the numerical arranging (usually poorly), and then goes back to fucking up the alphabet again.
I myself have been reduced to following her from a distance while she's in the library, like some kind of crazy detective. If I try to do my own work, she'll take the books I'm working with and put them out of order, or she'll trip over me trying to walk through a narrow passage instead of going around. If I get too close to what she's doing, she gets super defensive and offended. All I can do is trail far enough behind her to hope she doesn't notice, and repair the damage.
I wonder how I could suggest that she'd rather volunteer at the UCLA library?
She's not the only incompetent volunteer the library's ever seen, she's just the most consistent. Usually the ones who don't know what they're doing are kids who need school credit. They come in once or twice and don't have the opportunity to do a lot of damage. Alternatively, our “regulars” tend to be older, and have a firm grasp of alphabetical organization.
This woman appears to be in her early fifties, although it's difficult to tell. She obviously immigrated to the US from a Central Asian country, India or Pakistan, but exactly which one is also mysterious. She wears her hair in one long braid down her back, as most women from that part of the world seem to do (her hair is black but her roots are gray—I see that a lot in Asian women, do they dye their hair or does it grow out that way when they get older?), but her clothes are western, obviously cheap and badly sized; she has neither the Hindu forehead dot nor the Muslim head covering, so there are no clues about her life there, either. We literally know nothing about her except that she's a walking apologetic smile of incompetence.
When she first came in over a year ago, we started her off with audio/visual materials. We keep these only loosely alphabetized and most people find them to be the simplest items to shelve. But we soon noticed that she couldn't tell the difference between regular audio books and teen audio books (the teen audio books are marked with a large blue dot on the spine—even if you're colorblind, you can see the giant dots) and would consistently put the teen materials in with the adult materials. When we tried to gently correct her, she switched to putting the adult stuff in with the teen stuff, which was worse. She does not take well to instruction, either; if you repeat an instruction (and she realizes it's something she's been told before), she gets huffy, declares that she has a college education, and sulks. But she never leaves.
What we can't figure out about her, aside from everything, is why she wants to volunteer at the library at all. One of our clerks told me that her family just brings her and leaves her here twice a week, to force her to get out of the house (For her sake? Or theirs? Again, unclear). But if that was all it is, she could sit with a magazine for a couple of hours, or use the public internet. Instead, for reasons known maybe only to herself, she wants to be helpful. My theory is that she somehow got the idea that shelving books at the library would help her to improve her English language skills. This might be the case, if she were reading the English books or conversing with English-speaking people. Instead, she is bringing me books marked with the letter F, because they were written by, say, Jonathan Franzen, or Ford Madox Ford, and asking me where she should put them because she doesn't know where the books go that are written in French—which, admittedly, also begins with F.
My personal relationship with her has evolved since we've known each other. At first, I was happy to show her around and explain where everything was supposed to go. I didn't mind answering her questions. Asking questions is how you learn, after all. But after the third or fourth time she would ask me the same question and then get offended at the phrase, “Remember when I told you...”, she gave up asking me. And shortly afterward, when I realized she would just ignore me if I came to help her unsolicited, we basically reached a silent agreement to ignore each other. Except that she hasn't figured out how to walk around a bookshelf if someone is in her way, so if we're working in the same area at the same time, I end up getting squeezed past far more often than is comfortable for me. Which is to say, at all.
Now she and I are at a stalemate. The librarians refuse to ask her not to come back (their philosophy being that any volunteers are better than none, which would make sense of we didn't have a couple of dozen others to choose from), so they keep just trying to think of different new tasks that she might not fuck up. But she always finds a way. She's wily. She kept putting books in the wrong place, so they asked her to put the books on the shelf with the spines facing up instead of out so that we can check them when she's done. But after about one day, she learned to only face the spines upward when she knows the book is in the right place—if she's not sure, she puts it in normally. She thinks that by doing this we won't be able to figure out that she's the one making all the mistakes. But we did. We thought that maybe she was getting things wrong because English is not her first language (although no one knows what is), and so maybe she's just having trouble with the alphabet. I wouldn't trust myself to alphabetize correctly in Greek, or Chinese. So we asked her to put the non-fiction books in order, because they are arranged numerically. For some reason she's not into that, though, so she does about a third to half of the numerical arranging (usually poorly), and then goes back to fucking up the alphabet again.
I myself have been reduced to following her from a distance while she's in the library, like some kind of crazy detective. If I try to do my own work, she'll take the books I'm working with and put them out of order, or she'll trip over me trying to walk through a narrow passage instead of going around. If I get too close to what she's doing, she gets super defensive and offended. All I can do is trail far enough behind her to hope she doesn't notice, and repair the damage.
I wonder how I could suggest that she'd rather volunteer at the UCLA library?
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Aurora Nibley: The Rise and Fall of Britney Spears and the Spiders from Mars
It was the year 2000. Society was heaving a collective sigh of relief that all of our machines had neither died at the new year nor risen up against us. Al Gore and George Bush Junior were gearing up for what would turn out to be the most controversial Presidential election in history. And the world was in love with a girl named Britney Spears.
At nineteen years old, I was about six months older than Miss Spears (I still am, but we'll get to that in a bit), and had similar aspirations to hers, although I had not had the success. She, of course, had begun as a Mouseketeer on the Mickey Mouse Club at just about the time I was too old to be interested in it any longer, and was pushed by stage parents in a way that I only dreamed about (I had had a commercial agent briefly in my childhood, but my parents were quick to find reasons not to sacrifice their own time for my “career” (”Look at her, she's in the yard. Auditioning is obviously something she hates! We should never make her do it again.”)). In 2000, Britney Spears was sexing up her previously virginal image and was not only the most popular she was ever going to be, but probably the most famous person on the planet. Was I jealous? You bet. But even at nineteen, and admittedly with an air of sour grapes, I was saying, “Sure, I'd love to be Britney Spears now, but I'd hate to be Britney Spears in twenty years.” I had no idea how little I would have to wait.
In 2002, she made a movie called Crossroads, which bombed. Shortly thereafter, her relationship with Justin Timberlake ended, and as that news story began to fade, it seemed that her popularity was going with it. She tried stunt appearances, like making out with Madonna. She stopped listening to her handlers. In 2004, she got married in Vegas without even pausing to consider the fact that her bridegroom had the same name as one of the stars of Seinfeld, which was really confusing to a lot of people for a little while. The wheels were obviously coming off of the Britney train.
Around this same time, I was introduced to the concept of the celebrity death pool. A celebrity death pool is a sort of very dark joke among friends. Each person selects a celebrity or roster of celebrities (there are varying degrees of formality to the death pool). If a celebrity you choose dies, you get points in the pool. From the very beginning, I picked Britney every time.
I want to be clear that I didn't pick Britney to die because I wanted her to. That would have been too petty and crazy even for me. I actually had three very well thought out reasons for choosing her, which all dovetail nicely into one another:
1)The odds. As I said, there are varying degrees of intricacy to these pools, but one of the most common is that the less likely your celebrity's death seems, the more points you get if it happens. You could choose Luise Rainer (oldest living Academy Award winner, at 100 years old), but if she dies tomorrow, it will be less surprising than would be the death of, say, Dakota Fanning. You usually also get points for the person's level of fame, so Tom Hanks would be worth more than Peter Scolari if they both keeled over next week. Britney was young, healthy, and still pretty big, so I stood to gain a lot of not actual winnings.
2)From where I stood, the odds didn't look as long as they could have been. Britney was beginning a downward spiral that at the time, even I thought would be slow, and I figured, you never know.
3)This is the worst one. I really hate to be Debbie Downer, but by the time I was in my twenties I was already something of a connoisseur when it came to failure. Big failure, little failure, my own failure, other people's failure, surprise failure when you thought success was right in front of you, slowly ground out failure that you refused to accept and just kept acting like things would improve sometime. My brain is finely tuned when it comes to failure, believe me. And it was this part of my brain, the cold-blooded, Sammy Glick, Network part of my education, that told me that the best thing Britney Spears could possibly do for her career would be to commit suicide. I realize how awful that sounds, and again, I wasn't thinking this because I wanted her to do it — what difference would it possibly make in my life one way or another? None.
But think for a second. Think for a second about Elizabeth Taylor. She is one of the most beautiful women who ever lived. And she's a legend. And she's still alive, although much older and less beautiful, and most people who are under thirty don't really know who she is. Think about Vivien Leigh. Equally beautiful. Equally legendary. Tragically suffered from bipolar disorder before anyone understood what it was. But she lived to a healthy old age and most people under forty don't really know who she was. Now think about Marilyn Monroe. She's the international face of Hollywood and she's been dead for nearly fifty years. Now, Marilyn had an awful life and she shouldn't have died so young and we don't have time to go into all the reasons why she did, but if she had never taken those pills, today she would be a fat blonde old woman who once stood over a grate. Who was that lady? You know, the one who stood over the grate or whatever? Mary something. Look her up on Wikipedia, she's probably living in that one old folks' home for movie stars. Luise Rainer is there; it's where Bette Davis died. Anyway, it doesn't matter.
Britney met Kevin Federline at the end of 2004 and it was like grease on a slide. Marriage, kids, divorce, shaved head, gas station panties, hospitalized for her own good, fake British accent — for about a year, half of Hollywood's revenue came from what the paparazzi called the “Britney Circus.” Nobody has had that much grief just because they were a pretty girl in the wrong place since Evelyn Nesbit — and do you remember her? No? Of course not, because she lived. And then had a long, depressing life after the drama was over.
Well, Britney lived too, and still does, and is still six months younger than I am, which means she isn't even 29 yet. Who knows how long she will live — or how long any of us will live, for that matter. She's as entitled to a long happy life as anybody else. But there was a time when if she had timed her death right, she could have made herself immortal.
Unfortunately, in the words of Daffy Duck, “The problem with that trick is you can only do it once.”
Aurora Nibley lives in Hollywood with her husband and cat. She writes about football every now and again over here. Twitter her up on your Twitter machine here.
At nineteen years old, I was about six months older than Miss Spears (I still am, but we'll get to that in a bit), and had similar aspirations to hers, although I had not had the success. She, of course, had begun as a Mouseketeer on the Mickey Mouse Club at just about the time I was too old to be interested in it any longer, and was pushed by stage parents in a way that I only dreamed about (I had had a commercial agent briefly in my childhood, but my parents were quick to find reasons not to sacrifice their own time for my “career” (”Look at her, she's in the yard. Auditioning is obviously something she hates! We should never make her do it again.”)). In 2000, Britney Spears was sexing up her previously virginal image and was not only the most popular she was ever going to be, but probably the most famous person on the planet. Was I jealous? You bet. But even at nineteen, and admittedly with an air of sour grapes, I was saying, “Sure, I'd love to be Britney Spears now, but I'd hate to be Britney Spears in twenty years.” I had no idea how little I would have to wait.
In 2002, she made a movie called Crossroads, which bombed. Shortly thereafter, her relationship with Justin Timberlake ended, and as that news story began to fade, it seemed that her popularity was going with it. She tried stunt appearances, like making out with Madonna. She stopped listening to her handlers. In 2004, she got married in Vegas without even pausing to consider the fact that her bridegroom had the same name as one of the stars of Seinfeld, which was really confusing to a lot of people for a little while. The wheels were obviously coming off of the Britney train.
Around this same time, I was introduced to the concept of the celebrity death pool. A celebrity death pool is a sort of very dark joke among friends. Each person selects a celebrity or roster of celebrities (there are varying degrees of formality to the death pool). If a celebrity you choose dies, you get points in the pool. From the very beginning, I picked Britney every time.
I want to be clear that I didn't pick Britney to die because I wanted her to. That would have been too petty and crazy even for me. I actually had three very well thought out reasons for choosing her, which all dovetail nicely into one another:
1)The odds. As I said, there are varying degrees of intricacy to these pools, but one of the most common is that the less likely your celebrity's death seems, the more points you get if it happens. You could choose Luise Rainer (oldest living Academy Award winner, at 100 years old), but if she dies tomorrow, it will be less surprising than would be the death of, say, Dakota Fanning. You usually also get points for the person's level of fame, so Tom Hanks would be worth more than Peter Scolari if they both keeled over next week. Britney was young, healthy, and still pretty big, so I stood to gain a lot of not actual winnings.
2)From where I stood, the odds didn't look as long as they could have been. Britney was beginning a downward spiral that at the time, even I thought would be slow, and I figured, you never know.
3)This is the worst one. I really hate to be Debbie Downer, but by the time I was in my twenties I was already something of a connoisseur when it came to failure. Big failure, little failure, my own failure, other people's failure, surprise failure when you thought success was right in front of you, slowly ground out failure that you refused to accept and just kept acting like things would improve sometime. My brain is finely tuned when it comes to failure, believe me. And it was this part of my brain, the cold-blooded, Sammy Glick, Network part of my education, that told me that the best thing Britney Spears could possibly do for her career would be to commit suicide. I realize how awful that sounds, and again, I wasn't thinking this because I wanted her to do it — what difference would it possibly make in my life one way or another? None.
But think for a second. Think for a second about Elizabeth Taylor. She is one of the most beautiful women who ever lived. And she's a legend. And she's still alive, although much older and less beautiful, and most people who are under thirty don't really know who she is. Think about Vivien Leigh. Equally beautiful. Equally legendary. Tragically suffered from bipolar disorder before anyone understood what it was. But she lived to a healthy old age and most people under forty don't really know who she was. Now think about Marilyn Monroe. She's the international face of Hollywood and she's been dead for nearly fifty years. Now, Marilyn had an awful life and she shouldn't have died so young and we don't have time to go into all the reasons why she did, but if she had never taken those pills, today she would be a fat blonde old woman who once stood over a grate. Who was that lady? You know, the one who stood over the grate or whatever? Mary something. Look her up on Wikipedia, she's probably living in that one old folks' home for movie stars. Luise Rainer is there; it's where Bette Davis died. Anyway, it doesn't matter.
Britney met Kevin Federline at the end of 2004 and it was like grease on a slide. Marriage, kids, divorce, shaved head, gas station panties, hospitalized for her own good, fake British accent — for about a year, half of Hollywood's revenue came from what the paparazzi called the “Britney Circus.” Nobody has had that much grief just because they were a pretty girl in the wrong place since Evelyn Nesbit — and do you remember her? No? Of course not, because she lived. And then had a long, depressing life after the drama was over.
Well, Britney lived too, and still does, and is still six months younger than I am, which means she isn't even 29 yet. Who knows how long she will live — or how long any of us will live, for that matter. She's as entitled to a long happy life as anybody else. But there was a time when if she had timed her death right, she could have made herself immortal.
Unfortunately, in the words of Daffy Duck, “The problem with that trick is you can only do it once.”
Aurora Nibley lives in Hollywood with her husband and cat. She writes about football every now and again over here. Twitter her up on your Twitter machine here.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Aurora Nibley: Smyly darn ya, Smyly
I got a series of emails this past week from my grandfather in Alabama. Really it was just one email, but I received a series because it took him about six tries to fail to attach a file and then just copy and paste it into the body of an email for us to see, and this email (the one he wanted us to get) contained a copy of a list of farm chores. The only reason I can think of that I got this thing is that I must just be on Pappy (yes, Pappy)'s email list for his kids and grandkids and he sent the list out to everyone. What I really can't figure out is why he sent the thing out at all. He does have a farm, or at least a plot of land that he calls a farm, but he doesn't grow anything there. The list seems like actual chores that need to be done (there are items on the list like “insecticide on trees” and “weed old dogs' graves”), so I don't think this is just some old guy email gag. But I've only been to Alabama twice in my life and I have no intention of going now, so those chores are going to have to get done without me.
My mother's parents and all of their other children, and their children, live in Huntsville, Alabama, where Pappy is not in fact a farmer by trade. He worked for NASA all through the 1960's and 70's (he worked on the Apollo Program, as a matter of fact), he did well enough to retire early, and from what little contact I've had he seems to have spent the bulk of my lifetime just buying toys for himself. The “farm” was bought as a playground for his RVs, his tractor, his ATVs, and a Miata that he had for a while, until I came out to visit and told him it was a woman's car. (He sold it quietly, a few months later. I felt bad because I knew he loved that car, but I didn't make the rules—Miatas are for ladies.)
As for me and my Southern roots, I will happily exploit them for social purposes (“You're from Birmingham? No way! My family's all in Huntsville!”), but my father's family is based in the West and I was raised in Southern California, and I imprinted early. Alabama makes no sense to me. No sense. Pappy took me down the river one day on his boat (his boat! He has it for fishing! FISHING!!), and as we zoomed down the river (because fish apparently do not mind outboard motors), he pointed out lighter patches of rock on the cliffs above us. “See thar, hunny? That's whar the Yankees shot thar guns for practiss whal they was cummin down the river.” For a confused moment or two I thought he was talking about the baseball team.
Really, the only time I have ever been identified by anyone at all as Southern was when I was doing the most Californian thing ever: making movies. In a past life, I worked quite a bit as a movie extra and slightly less as a production assistant, and it's true what they say: Hollywood is a small town. Even as a “Background Actor” (read: “extra”: read: “human set dressing”), you see the same faces over and over again. That winter, I had stolen a University of Alabama sweatshirt from my mother, and was known for wearing it around set when the cameras weren't on. Since remembering people's names can be such a chore, there were several people who took to calling me “Alabama,” which was written in huge letters on my sweatshirt and was a cute thing to be called, so I went with it. I was confused the first couple of times people came up to me and said “Roll tide,” but who wouldn't be? I mean, that's a crappy fight call. What kind of school has a mascot that a person can't dress up as?
Pappy and the rest of the Smyly crew had their annual family reunion about a month ago. I wasn't there, but I have seen videos of previous Smyly reunions. They involve lots of campfire songs and wearing the same t-shirts and running around in the Alabama woods. I guess that since they comprise a large clan themselves, they aren't afraid of being attacked by any potential background artists from, say, Deliverance.
The high point of the Smyly reunion is the yearly game of Undertaker. Pappy and the two of his sons-in-law who are in attendance find a person who has not been to the reunion before. I'm not really clear on how they do this; I'm sure that by now they've been reduced to using my cousins' junior high school sweethearts. Anyway, they take this poor victim, blindfold him or her, and instruct them to behave as though they were a corpse being measured for a coffin. Pappy and my two evil uncles then use a tape measure to measure the length of the “body.” They lift the head, to measure it for a “hat,” they lift the arm and measure that, and finally, they lift one of the person's legs up into the air and pour a glass of ice water down their pant leg, to the delight of all. I'm heartbroken to have missed it.
I guess my point is that I am in the Smyly family, but not of it. And I for one am all right with that. I am grateful for the genetic material and all, but no matter how much money Pappy may have (and he has a lot), I just can't get on board with the cruel practical jokes, and the hard-core right-wing values, and the offensive pretend racism (I like my pretend racism to actually have a punchline, at least). So even though I like the idea of having a large tribe to be a part of and I sometimes am sad that I don't live near any of my family, I think I can get by in my little apartment with my husband and my cat and the name that I got from my father (I don't get along with him either, but that's another story for another day).
The family I've got is small, but I picked it out myself.
My mother's parents and all of their other children, and their children, live in Huntsville, Alabama, where Pappy is not in fact a farmer by trade. He worked for NASA all through the 1960's and 70's (he worked on the Apollo Program, as a matter of fact), he did well enough to retire early, and from what little contact I've had he seems to have spent the bulk of my lifetime just buying toys for himself. The “farm” was bought as a playground for his RVs, his tractor, his ATVs, and a Miata that he had for a while, until I came out to visit and told him it was a woman's car. (He sold it quietly, a few months later. I felt bad because I knew he loved that car, but I didn't make the rules—Miatas are for ladies.)
As for me and my Southern roots, I will happily exploit them for social purposes (“You're from Birmingham? No way! My family's all in Huntsville!”), but my father's family is based in the West and I was raised in Southern California, and I imprinted early. Alabama makes no sense to me. No sense. Pappy took me down the river one day on his boat (his boat! He has it for fishing! FISHING!!), and as we zoomed down the river (because fish apparently do not mind outboard motors), he pointed out lighter patches of rock on the cliffs above us. “See thar, hunny? That's whar the Yankees shot thar guns for practiss whal they was cummin down the river.” For a confused moment or two I thought he was talking about the baseball team.
Really, the only time I have ever been identified by anyone at all as Southern was when I was doing the most Californian thing ever: making movies. In a past life, I worked quite a bit as a movie extra and slightly less as a production assistant, and it's true what they say: Hollywood is a small town. Even as a “Background Actor” (read: “extra”: read: “human set dressing”), you see the same faces over and over again. That winter, I had stolen a University of Alabama sweatshirt from my mother, and was known for wearing it around set when the cameras weren't on. Since remembering people's names can be such a chore, there were several people who took to calling me “Alabama,” which was written in huge letters on my sweatshirt and was a cute thing to be called, so I went with it. I was confused the first couple of times people came up to me and said “Roll tide,” but who wouldn't be? I mean, that's a crappy fight call. What kind of school has a mascot that a person can't dress up as?
Pappy and the rest of the Smyly crew had their annual family reunion about a month ago. I wasn't there, but I have seen videos of previous Smyly reunions. They involve lots of campfire songs and wearing the same t-shirts and running around in the Alabama woods. I guess that since they comprise a large clan themselves, they aren't afraid of being attacked by any potential background artists from, say, Deliverance.
The high point of the Smyly reunion is the yearly game of Undertaker. Pappy and the two of his sons-in-law who are in attendance find a person who has not been to the reunion before. I'm not really clear on how they do this; I'm sure that by now they've been reduced to using my cousins' junior high school sweethearts. Anyway, they take this poor victim, blindfold him or her, and instruct them to behave as though they were a corpse being measured for a coffin. Pappy and my two evil uncles then use a tape measure to measure the length of the “body.” They lift the head, to measure it for a “hat,” they lift the arm and measure that, and finally, they lift one of the person's legs up into the air and pour a glass of ice water down their pant leg, to the delight of all. I'm heartbroken to have missed it.
I guess my point is that I am in the Smyly family, but not of it. And I for one am all right with that. I am grateful for the genetic material and all, but no matter how much money Pappy may have (and he has a lot), I just can't get on board with the cruel practical jokes, and the hard-core right-wing values, and the offensive pretend racism (I like my pretend racism to actually have a punchline, at least). So even though I like the idea of having a large tribe to be a part of and I sometimes am sad that I don't live near any of my family, I think I can get by in my little apartment with my husband and my cat and the name that I got from my father (I don't get along with him either, but that's another story for another day).
The family I've got is small, but I picked it out myself.
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