Books!

My mother tells me that when I was less than a year old, I used to sit on the floor in the living room, pull a book off the well stocked shelves, and flip through the pages as if I were reading. Although I'm not sure I believe this completely, she tells me that I didn't even rip the pages. I do remember being six and pulling down the A book from the World Book to flip through. I was particularly fascinated with the page that showed the variety of apples. I spent most of my childhood flipping through those books. I still do when I'm over at my parent's house. I spent 60% of my childhood stretched out on the couch in my parent's living room reading. 

My parent's house is filled with books. There is not a single room in that home that doesn't have books. It was such a regular part of my childhood that upon entering a friend's house I was filled with a sense of unease. It was half way into my visit before I realized that there was not a single book in sight. If you walk into my living room right now you'd find: two books and a notebook on the couch, four library books stacked on the dining table, a bookcase filled with cookbooks, a stack of magazines and one lonely paperback on the coffee table, and at least a half dozen books on the stairs waiting to go up. And this isn't where I keep my collection. I keep the majority of my books in the library. But like my parents, you can't find a room in the house where you don't find reading material. 

I've been thinking about my passion recently. I want to find what makes me the happiest, what makes time fly. I want to figure out what I'm the most passionate about. Then I look around. And find myself surrounded by books. I realize that one of the things that bothers me the most about my job is that I'm not working with books regularly. I notice that I'm donating my time at the library. And that when I enter a library, a bookshop, or someone's personal library, time seems to slow down. I browse, running my fingers gently along the spines of books. I can spend hours glancing at titles, picking up books, copying quotes from books, collecting books, and of course reading books. I don't know about you, but that seems like the definition of a passion. I think I found it. My great passion is books. Now to find a way to make that my occupation. 

Passion and Madness

I've been drinking cheap red wine in the bathtub which means that this will be more maudlin and romantic then I mean it to be. It never fails. Give me a bottle of red wine and I will write you sonnets. Or at least feverishly slave away with words like the great poets of old. I wonder what's in the wine to make me do that.

I'm reading a book about reading (my favorite subject) and the author is talking about poets. Not just any poets but the masters of romanticism. Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire. Poets that I used to read (in translation of course) and dream of passion and madness. Years ago I bought a greeting card that had the phrase "passion is a form of madness". I bought it for the saying. I was a young romantic. I wanted that passion. I wanted to be that starving artist living in a garret, selling poems to buy cheap red wine and a meal that night. Some night (like tonight) I still do.

But as I read this book I remembered a picture. I don't know if I've posted it here before and I know that tonight I won't be able to describe why this photo pierced my soul. Why I printed a copy and moved it from house to house. Why it used to sit above my writing desk. The simplest explanation is that this photo (by Felix Nadar in 1856) captured the passion and madness of Charles Baudelaire. I've loved this photo my entire life. From the moment I first saw it I loved it. I knew I needed to have a copy. I can't really explain way. It's terrible quality. It's blurry and odd, but I love it. Something about it speaks to me. And some days I understand what it's saying.

Create and Destro

No that is not a typo. I know you're looking at it, visually adding the Y. But trust me, it's not. It'll make sense in a moment.

Those of you who know me, know that I tend to get heavily involved with whatever I'm passionate about for a couple weeks and then I move on to something else. This isn't new. I've been doing this all my life. For a period of time I will read and learn everything I can about Japanese Fish Printing. Then a month later I'm obsessed with Kayaking. A month after that and all I can talk about is Botany. You get the idea.

But there are a couple things that seem to defy this trend. The first is writing and storytelling. I've been writing or storytelling (different things for me) since I was a small child and that's not about to stop now. The second is animation which I am a HUGE fan of. Anything animated interests me. I'm fascinated by all types. The third is reading which is a bit like breathing to me. I'm not going to stop until they nail my coffin shut.

But I've picked up two new passions in the last year that seem to be defying the "month or two" trend. And these hobbies are different as night and day. The first is knitting, which my little sister taught me about two years ago. And I'm incredibly grateful. Thanks sis. On Wednesday I finished my first mitten. I used the wrong needles and it's way too small for me, but it's a mitten. And the moment I finished it, I picked up my new correctly sized needles and started the ones for me. I love that I'm taking one long piece of yarn and creating something I can wear from it. I have a group of women who I meet with every Wednesday and we sit, and knit, and drink coffee, and talk. And I've just recently hit my stride when it comes to knitting. I'll probably never be as good as two of my groupmates who just submitted sweaters to the state fair, but I love the chance to create. I've never been particularly crafty, so this is a chance to experiment and try and still create something that I'll wear with pride in the winter months.

The second "newish" passion is for WoW. Although the hobby waxes and wanes in the amount of time I'm playing, it hasn't gone away. I'm not doing a lot of soloing recently, focusing instead on raiding with the guild, but I'm shockingly still playing. What started out as an agreement between Jeff and I (I would try WoW, he would try knitting) has stuck into a regular hobby. I play at least 12 hours a week, which may seem like a lot, but is down considerably from where I was. Last night I raided with the guild in Naxx and we managed to bring down three quarters and part of a fourth in three hours. That's huge. It is scary to think that we might be reaching a point where we could complete Naxx in one night. WoW for me is just an extension of all the role playing games I enjoyed when I was younger. For a couple hours I get to play a totally different person. A character that destroys. A character that shoots fire from their hands. They don't call them Destro warlocks for nothing. :-)

So I think about my new hobbies. One based on creating and one based on destroying. And it seems a good balance to me. Ying and yang. And for the moment, they're sticking around.

Geek The Library

The library system has long needed a good PR campaign. Libraries for some reason are still seen as dusty, musty buildings filled with books and librarians who wander around shushing. If you've been in a library recently, that is simply not the case. Most libraries nowadays are becoming community hang-outs, game centers, movie rental places, and internet cafes. Oh and they still house books. And slowly the library's image is changing.

OCLC is looking to change that image a bit faster with its new Geek the Library campaign. As a self-described geek I was interested in the name. Geek can have multiple meanings but OCLC appears to be creating their own definition for this. Geek in this sense is to have a strong interest in and/or be knowledgable about a particular subject. It is about the subjects we are passionate about. (the original definition of geek was a circus performer, a wild man who bit the heads of live chickens. Fun fact) The website is a mixture of information and community forum. People are encourage to write in about their passions and share how they got interested in their subject. They are also encouraged to say how the library has helped them learn more. There are links to facebook, youtube, and myspace for people to link to and for people to spread the word about libraries.

There is information and event ideas to show the public how valuable a library can be to their community. There is a section about all the different roles a library plays. And suggestions about how to get better funding for libraries and improve services. The site is simple but interesting. It is highlighted with people's faces and what they geek. There are wallpaper images available for download and customizable gear for sale. (although when I tried them today the download links didn't work)

The focus is on making this a grassroots movement to improve libraries and the funding sources. People forget that during times of economic crisis the number of people using the library goes way up, and the amount of budget available to the library goes down. This is OCLC's way of helping out. I'm a huge fan of any library initiative and excited that this one is very grassroots. They are capitalizing on the current social networks and creating one of their own. It is a wonderful program that I hope does well. Then again I always want to see libraries and library programs do well. I geek libraries....along with a host of other subjects. What do you geek?