Extreme Personality Leakage

Those who know me well know that, unless stressed, I read 2-3 books per day, devouring up to six if inspired. When stressed, I fret incessantly about the inappropriateness of my  thrift store, cardigan-and-pleated-skirt wardrobe.

I've read two books in a week and am contemplating low rise jeans and a shirt other than a polo.

This impacts my blog. Even though I have posted almost every day since January, I have probably been less informative and interactive of late, and certainly much less amusing. I apologize.

There's nothing major. My children are at an age where they are trying, mostly in annoying ways, to prove they don't need me, while my parents, without trying, need me more each day.

My union made the news, and I will say only that while I don't agree with them at all, I will follow their dictates to preserve my peaceful working relationship with fellow teachers. After I escaped threatened cuts for this year, the school board could offer to pay me in coal and turnips and have my health care delivered telepathically by a holistic shaman (which I believe is our governor's plan), and I'd make it work. But there is nothing I can do.

Sustained Silent Reading time, during which I have instructed classes for the past five years, was cut at my school, just at the time when need to deliver state curriculum and common core standards to all students. I have no idea how I will do that.

Nevertheless, I have decided that my slogan for the year is "Be Your Own Hero". I will do what I can to make my library program a success, help out others in the building, and most of all, focus on what I do best and is ultimately the most important thing-- getting the right book to the right child at the right time, for all 750 of my students.

I had a dream last night (not the one where Legolas, as played by Orlando Bloom, asks me to take over the Elven library) that a nearby well-to-do district had its middle school librarian of 40 years retire, and they head hunted me. They were attracted to my encyclopedic knowledge of middle grade literature, my ability to match books with children, my singing on the morning announcements, and the general quirkiness of my personality that begins with my insistence on wearing vintage prom dresses to work just because I can and culminates in my desire to die at my library desk instead of retire.

If I worked for them, they said, the children would come every week to the library for books and a library lesson (technology being covered in another class), I would never be asked to cover a study hall or close the library for school pictures or meetings, my budget would be $6,000, I would have a full time assistant, and they would renovate the library to my specifications, just as they did for the retiring librarian when she was hired in 1972. They wanted, they said, for me to be happy, because then I would do my best work.


I wonder how Superman trained to be able to leap over buildings in a single bound. It couldn't have been easy. I suspect he started hopping over chairs and tables, and built his way up, like the 4H participants who pick up a calf every day of its life until one day they find themselves lifting a 400 pound animal. 


Superhero training begins today. It can only help things improve.