A friend writes:
"I've wondered if there might be a spell to make me feel better on Monday mornings. Or perhaps just ward them off completely?"
A spell to ward off Monday mornings. You're talking about the most mournful of mornings? On the wickedest of weekdays? I am a sorceror of some note, my brash friend, but you make my adam's apple tremble in trepidation, for MONDAY is the *blackest* of evils and only the mightiest of heroes, whose heart is pure, whose clarity of purpose pierces the mists like the fiery first lance of the risen sun, whose will is as a mountain of iron, immovable! can hope to defeat the curse of that unholy hour.
Nevertheless, if you are bound and determined to this course of action, I swear you to secrecy and impart this incantation to you, and I bear NO responsibility as to the particulars of any consequences, real or imagined. On your own head be it, Mr. Coleman-Faust.
Call up the Demon of Employment. (Thou shalt know Him by the sulph'rous reek of Hell which waxeth strong at the beginning of the week but which waneth towards Friday afternoon.)
Say to Him, "It is I, Coleman! Listen thou to me, Foule Devill!"
And here is the rub. You shall say this in a weak and papery whisper, as if you had dragged yourself from the very grave to report your recent death:
"I have the flu or something."
You must, with this one utterance, convey the Black Death, the Plague of Boils upon Egypt, and a head-ache splitting your skull like a buzzsaw in a birdcage, for then, and only then, will you be freed from the Dire Pit of Darkest Monday.
Use sparingly.
I accidentally discovered today that the first "website" I ever designed is still up.
It was a library school assignment, in 1999, and Netscape 4.6 was cutting edge. I'm pretty sure I intended the site to best fit a 640x480 screen resolution, because it doesn't do so well on my 22" widescreen 1680 x 1050 monitor:
LibraryElf is a free service that hooks you up to your library and sends you notices by email, RSS or text message about overdues before they're overdue. A simple but powerful concept, and one that I have asked of my local public library (Greater Victoria Public Library) more than once. I was told one time by a circulation clerk that it would tax the system too greatly to send out that many emails.
Uh-huh.
I actually held my tongue. I *could* have unleashed the lion-headed snake-beast of derision to bite her face off, but I have the patience of a saint. It's not her fault she had no idea of the technical grounds whereof she spoke. Or that, let's see, everyone somehow gets an email after the item's due date.
I guess we don't want to confuse the system by sending an overdue notice before the item is overdue. It wouldn't *be* an overdue notice then, would it? I can see how the system would get its knickers twisted into a Gordian wad over such a paradox in logic.
Left: Captain James T. Kirk convinces the NOMAD probe to destroy itself by forcing it to confront its own lapse in logic. You! Are! Illogical!
Star Trek Ep. 32 "The Changeling"
So, LibraryElf. Awesome! You can link in different library cards from different libraries into one account to get a consolidated list of the family's loans, set your notification preferences to any combination of email, RSS, and SMS, and adjust notification periodicity, so once a day, once a week, or whatever.
It's brilliant, it's what public libraries should already have on offer, and damn it, I wish I'd thought of it first.
The cat is doing relatively well, I think. Considering.
I've seen him stand up on his own, though he prefers not to, as it is obviously a painful process. He is eating regularly and eliminating irregularly.
I am becoming adept at shooting a gluey medication down his throat every 12 hours, which prevents him bleeding out his gut. For best results: get cat between knees, grasp head firmly, and thrust syringe between teeth. When mouth opens in annoyance, fire! Then clean up the drooly glop that drips down his chin and onto his chest as he schmecks it.
I have also been charting his reckless spending habits. He started out in Ottawa, a frostbitten mangy stray brought in off the streets in the bitter Eastern winter. That cost him something. Then he snagged Rachelle's sweater in the animal shelter which led to years of pampering and relative safety. When we moved to Victoria, he somehow became very ill and just about bought it (possibly pancreatitis). There was a heavy fine levied on that transaction. And now this.
The cat was padding along the edge of the mortal coil last night, as his red blood cell count dropped to a perilously low 15%. At 14%, they need to do a transfusion, and even then internal bleeding could just leak it all out again.
As of this morning it has climbed back up to 23%, which is excellent. The vet is very pleased, and no transfusions or exploratory surgeries will be required as long as he continues in this positive direction.
Live, you damn cat.
Our cat Mao was hit by a car (probably). He's in the animal hospital. He's recovering and we hope he's going to be okay and able to come home in a couple of days.
Meanwhile the twice-daily status reports on his red blood cell count and his ability to bear weight on his back legs are pretty tough to bear, because frankly I love this cat more than I do most people. Not you! I mean those other people that cut you off in traffic or won't get out of your way in the grocery aisle. Those jerks.
We visited him yesterday and he was extremely stoned on narcotics, but he recognized us and enjoyed our company, and ate a little bit. I'm off to visit him again in a few minutes.
Stupid cat. Doesn't he know the car always wins?
I am a sucker for a woman who can make language dance. Or in this case*, who breaks its legs and arms and makes a dancing meat puppet out of its still twitching corpse.
I can't remove my eyes from you. You are so handsome and so interesting man, I have never met before into my life. As usual men got acquainted with me, but everything is different today.
It sure is.
Maybe I am very ordinary person from one look, and you won't fall in love from the first sight. But don't be very precipitate at coming to your decision.
Ok.
Kiss-kiss,
Mari
Mari, you horrify me. Please take your eyeballs back.
* I read all my correspondence. If someone took the time to craft a letter sharp enough to get past the kill zone of my spam filter, it deserves my attention.
A tale recycled for Matt, the librarian.
There are a million stories in the naked psyche, and this is one of them.
Who are we, each of us, and what might we become, given the right stimulus? Bitten by a radioactive lamprey, victim of a faulty Dr. Zonk's Wacky Kemistry set, unwilling host to an extraterrestrial brain clam - any of these coincidences could mutate us into one of the Wonder Twins, with irrevocable changes to our credit rating. Once the need to wear tight 'n' bright underthings over things starts, it never lets go. This is how it happened to me.
I was working in the Manley P. Ketchwater Memorial Library, as I regularly did on Thursday afternoons, sorting piles of old rectal thermometry journals and wistfully imagining what it might be like to wear pantyhose with plenty of pepper, when a reverberating crash woke me from my reverie. Jumping up, I noticed smoke coming from the photocopier area. (5 cents per copy, please respect copyrighted material.)
Where there's smoke, there's fire! The journals! My mind raced furiously. What would Manley P. Ketchwater have done? Come up with a bold new vision statement and accompanying fundraiser campaign, that's what. Curse my weak grasp of bureaucracy!
I fell back on what I knew. I hawked up the wettest loogie my febrile lungs could produce, leapt the circ counter and hauled ass, ready to let fly at the first sight of flame.
The sight that met my eyes when I lurched to a halt was horrific. Smoke belched from a sizzling public access photocopier, its paper trays exploded outwards from the twisted wreck. The air was filled with the sound of its fritzing. Black toner had splattered in Rorschach nightmares all over the sensible oat-coloured carpet. But worst of all, and this I will never forget if I live to be a hundred, was the wild-eyed patron with his pants around his ankles, his hammy buttocks jammed into the document feeder. "What have you done!" I cried, hysterical. "Oversize materials are to be put directly onto the glass! For God's sake, get out of there, man!"
But the erstwhile butt prankster could only bulge his eyes pleadingly in my direction. He was trapped: a fleshy organ in the proverbial organ grinder. Before I even realized what I was doing, I drew my access override card from where it was holstered on my hip and lunged towards the hapless victim. Frantically I swiped the card through the slot again and again, until by some miracle the jam cleared, and Fatty rolled free.
That's when she blew.
With a deep vibrating thrum that I could feel in my teeth, the copier erupted, the blast lifting me off my feet in a purple surge of supercharged photoelectric radiation. Blackness and pain seized me, the world swam dizzyingly out of focus, and I knew no more.
I came to, days later, to a different life. Oh sure, the burns healed, the bones set, the fragments of my teeth were dug out of the nearby oak shelving units and glued back together by amateur orthodontal enthusiasts and then trashed and new ones carved from narwhal ivory, but I was never the same again. The accident changed me. Somehow the energy discharged by that dying copier must have altered my molecular structure...
...is the explanation I came up with after a solid 15 minutes in the ready reference section. I had a duty now to use my super powers for good, to help the helpless, to answer any question no matter how inane, to exercise leadership in planning, implementing and promoting the preservation, organization and effective use of society's recorded information and ideas! *
And so by day, I continue to fool the world into thinking I am a mild-mannered librarian. But at night, when the doors close and the last Sidney Sheldon book has been returned to its place upon the shelf, then I become LIBRARIAN IN UNDERPANTS! Leaping from stack to stack! Ha haaaa!
And in the morning, when the staff come in, the chairs have been magically straightened, the cookery section mysteriously weeded, the science fiction and mystery paperbacks repaired with tape and sorted by author's last name!
Yes! It was I! The librarian, you fools!
But they will never know. So Mr. Soapes the night janitor found a pair of men's trousers draped over the microfiche. What does that prove? I'm a SUPER hero. It'll take more than a chilly run home over fences and through backyards to avoid the cops to stop ME.
* The latter being perhaps the finest blandest mission statement of any library school ever.
