nerdage

I move around a lot. In the past three years, i've lived in six different towns in 4 different time zones. This weekend i'm heading off to my 7th (but still 4 time zones). And you know what my first order of business will be, after i get moved in and get started at work? I intend to get my 7th library card. As soon as I have a piece of mail directed to me in Baltimore, I plan to head over to the central branch and get signed up. What can I say? I like libraries. They're far cheaper than bookstores (free is my favorite price) and i'm very good about renewals and due dates. I think the maximum fine i racked up in Berkeley was 25¢, which i handed over grudgingly. Big City libraries give you endless opportunities for all forms of entertainment, from books to movies to music to some, albeit dweeby, software. I love the quiet, I love the smell, I love leaving with a stack of fiction to envelop myself in. In a good book the real world melts away, I melt away, and the concerns of the characters are mine. The main character Is me--and when I look away from the page and see myself in the bathroom mirror I'm always a little startled and disappointed that its still me over there.

I love checking out of the library when there's a line--Nothing like stacks of titles to give you an impression of the people around you. It may not be an accurate impression--the whole book by its cover situation--but it feeds an imaginative mind. Some paranoid part of me wonders if some people are just checking books out to raise eyebrows, or are attempting to hide a stack of comic books with that dense tome of medieval prose. I'm always embarrassed that people are judging me when a title I'm checking out has a particularly colorful cover or is shaped like a grocery store paperback. I know most people don't notice or care, but if I'm busying myself making up lives for the patrons around me, it only follows that someone else might be doing the same. I'm a little weird.

Anyway, Teddy wants attention now. He's officially bigger than Boots ever was and he's still kitten shaped. He's teething, and has doubles of many as the baby teeth are reluctant to fall out. The bottom row canines have changed out, though, and the vet says this is normal. Interesting, huh?