I've decided to become nocturnal. Actually, I decide this every summer when it starts getting hot, but have yet to carry out on my threat. I don't want to be a vampire (in case that's what you assumed), just nocturnal.

This house is like some sort of deranged house-shaped battery!  When the weather's warm and sunny, it stores up all the heat and doesn't release it until the wee hours of the morning. I went to bed at 6:30 this morning, and slept fitfully until 3 this afternoon. I hope the library can accommodate my new schedule, but if they can't I'll just resort to my second career choice: grave robbing. It's likely to be a lonely business, but I'm sure to encounter plenty of zombies while I work, and then I can befriend the zombies and then I will become "fucking king of the zombies"! (See Shaun of the Dead.)

Isn't it funny how life's twists and turns take you to the most unexpected places? When I was a child, who'd have guessed that I'd become a zombie fiend??? (But then again, I've always had a deep affinity for the macabre... as a kid, though, I preferred ghosts.) I love Zombies... I can't get enough of them... I'm so sad I missed the zombie movie festival at the Hollywood theater in Portland last weekend, but next year... next year I'll be in line a month before the festival starts, with my lawn chair, and a pup tent, and a good supply of cheese and many packages of Brussels cookies and quarts and quarts of milk... and maybe I'll even be on the news!

Interesting, but possibly disturbing, fact: I have 15 different Requiems in my iPod: Mozart, Lloyd Weber, Brahms, Faure, Durufle, Britten, Bryars, Dvorak, Verdi, Glass, Preisner, Rutter, Berlioz, Schumann and Ligeti. Go ahead: analyze me.

Word of the Day: Macabre. Use it, but for the love of God, pronounce it correctly: Muh-COB.

Quote of the Day: "Lisa, vampires are make-believe, like elves, gremlins, and eskimos”

*Not, as you might guess by the themes of this post, an undead insect residing in 'Salem's Lot, but in fact the most unsettling bug I've ever seen: a huge half-cricket/ half-human-embryo!  BTW- if you haven't seen the Asian movie anthology 3 Extremes, I highly recommend it, primarily for the first installment: Dumpling.

It's so damned hot. I haven't slept in 3 days. It's 4:30 Saturday morning. The bags under my eyes look like steamer trunks. It's entirely possible that I've died and gone to hell... Ayn Rand's here (no surprise there.) I hate it... I hate her: condescending bitch.

Word of the Day: Condescending. It's not a good one, but I haven't slept in three days: give me a fucking break.

Quote of the Day: "What do I look like? A typewriter?"

As dull as the first day of jury duty was (almost as dull as this post, but not quite), I have to admit that I kinda enjoyed the second (and final) day.  The trial itself was not particularly fascinating, but I did learn that I have little respect for Chiropractors.  Our  case  involved a guy who had been in a relatively minor accident and a week afterwards had sought the help of a chiropractor for some back and neck pain he was experiencing.  The Doc then commenced a 2-year campaign focused on not helping the accident victim heal, but instead aimed at making his own services as necessary as possible as far into the distant future as possible.  I'm not saying the quack was guilty of malpractice, but I do believe that his goal is the mere short-term "fixing" of patients' problems so that they have to keep returning to him indefinitely.  The plaintiff seemed like a good fellow, and I believe he'd been convinced to bring the lawsuit against the defendant (the other party involved in the accident) by his shady chiropractor and by an ambulance-chasing lawyer.  Had it been entirely up to me, I'd have awarded him nothing in damages, but of the 12 people present on the jury, 8 disagreed with me.  We deliberated for 2 hours, and finally settled on a compromise that I'm not happy with.  Had the defense made a case at all, I think we could have agreed on a more just settlement. If only I controlled the world... sigh...

On Wednesday I wrote a poem.  But I've forgotten it and I left it at work.  I will post it here when I remember to bring it home.  I know it had the word sultry in it...

Word of the Day: Shady. In the context of dishonest motivations (not a cool spot under a tree on a sunny day.)

Quote of the Day: "If I were the president, if I were queen for a day: I'd give the ugly people all the money.  I'd rewrite the book of love; I'd make it funny."

I want a piece of the cake that Bruce Bogtrotter was forced to eat in Matilda. A large piece. Huge. With a pitcher of organic 2% milk. But I want mine made by someone other than Thrunchbull Academy's slovenly cook (is it a requirement that in movies all school cooks have to be grotesque?)  I want mine made by... Martha Stewart. From prison. A Martha Stewart Prison Cake. Mmmmm... sounds delectable, doesn't it?

BTW: jury duty is not all it's cracked up to be. I'm looking forward to deliberation: the sheer power!  To hold someone's fate in my hands... Mwahahahaha!  I shall act responsibly, of course...

Quote of the Day: "We have so much time and so little to do!"

Word of the Day: Slovenly.  Here's an example: Sweating and covered in chocolate after eating a slice of Martha Stewart Prison Cake, Ken's slovenly appearance repulsed the restaurant's other customers.

Which reminds me of a story: Several years ago I went to Williamsburg, VA with my parents and my great-aunt (this was before I had a life of my own.)  Marcel Desaulniers' restaurant, The Trellis, is in the historic area of Williamsburg, and I was determined to try his dessert Death by Chocolate. On our last night in town, lacking reservations, we stopped by The Trellis to see if we could get a table.  The place was packed and the waiting list was well over an hour long.  To my father, that seemed like way too long to wait just for dessert, and we resigned ourselves to returning home without attempting chocolate suicide.   As we turned to go, we noticed that there were empty tables outside and asked if we could sit at one of them.  Of course, the tables were empty for a reason: it was pouring rain.  But there were umbrellas over the tables and my Mom, Aunt and I were hell-bent on indulgence.  We were seated in the rain and we pressed ourselves as close to the table as possible so that most of our bodies were under the protection of the umbrella.  At this time I was already quite large (throughout our visit with her, my aunt kept telling me stories about my 700 pound cousin... or uncle... I suppose a warning about my genetic tendencies), so my over-sized belly prevented me from getting too close to the table. They served us coffee and DBC, we ate quickly, paid our check and got up to leave.  When I stood up I discovered that, despite the tight seal formed by my belly pressing against the table's edge, I'd still somehow managed to get chocolate all over my khaki pants.  There was no chocolate on my shirt, just on my pants...  It's my gift: give me chocolate and a good portion of it will circumvent any preventative measures I may have taken (you know: lap-napkins, strategically-placed furniture... bibs) and end up on my clothes.  The dessert was delicious, but I imagine Martha Stewart Prison Cake would be even better...

Go in peace

After suffering through a cold for a week, I think I may have finally caught up on my sleep this weekend. It wasn't a bad cold, but I couldn't sleep like my body was demanding because I had a project I was working on for work. I went out to dinner Friday night with my friend Skye (it's amazing how even the shabbiest burger is improved when slathered with enough Mayonnaise... but shabby oysters can never be rescued, not even by a jarful of Hellmans' magical properties), and as much fun as I was having with her, I felt like I was gonna fall asleep on her poor couch: I just kept sinking lower and lower... and yet, as soon as I got home I was WIRED and didn't go to bed till 2:30 a.m... and then slept till 5 Saturday evening. Needless to say, I didn't go to Seattle and I didn't see Alexander McCall Smith or my friend Brian. Sigh. I was really looking forward to both.

I have jury duty this week. I've never done the jury duty thing before, and to the confusion of many I'm actually kinda looking forward to it. Of course, I have visions of To Kill a Mockingbird or Inherit the Wind or 12 Angry Men running through my head, so my expectations may be just a wee bit... heightened beyond reason (thanks, Troy...)  Whatever transpires, I will report the whole sure-to-be-riveting experience here. I wonder if they'll serve lunch? If they do, I hope they supply enough mayonnaise.

Quote of the Day:
"I remember mistaking an old woman for a trout stream in Vermont, and I had to beg her pardon.
" 'Excuse me,' I said, 'I though you were a trout stream.'
" 'I'm not,' she said."

Word of the Day: Slather. You don't have to use it if you can demonstrate it. Go ahead: slather something with something else.

The OLA conference is over, and for the past two days I've had Nicolas Roeg's movie, The Witches, on my mind. It's a movie I adore, based on one of my absolute favorite Roald Dahl books, and starring the incomparable Angelica Houston as the leader of all the world's witches. There's a scene in a hotel ballroom in which all the witches of England are meeting under the guise of a child-advocacy group. Once the room's doors have been closed and locked and the witches are alone, Houston tells them all (in a German accent) "You may remove your vigs!", and the 100 or more women gathered, who at first glance appeared to be a collection of kindly, cookie-baking and tea-drinking old spinster aunts, remove their wigs to reveal that they are actually bald, ghoulish harpies from hell! "You may remove your shoes!" and with a collective sigh of release, dozens of witches remove their square-toed shoes (square-toed because witches actually have no toes, dontcha know) and ecstatically stretch their hideous feet. Then the Grand High Witch removes her human face mask (it's always startling when this happens, whether in a movie or in real life) and underneath is a hunch-backed green-tinted crone with a 6" nose and liver lips. There's a secret part of me that, because my nature delights in people whose physical appearances reveal little of their true selves, wanted very badly for this to happen at a conference of librarians: 1000 women, the majority of whom are the gentlest grandmother-types you could ever imagine, peel off their librarian faces to reveal that they are in fact baby-eating fiends from the darkest pits of the underworld who have gathered to discuss their plans for world domination.  Alas, librarians turn out to be as sweet as they look... it's disgusting.

Zombie librarians would've been way cool too...

Quote of the Day: "Who died and made you fucking king of the zombies?"

Word of the Day: Ghoulish.

OLA, day one.  The leader of the seminar I attended ("Hire Right the First Time!"... see why I loathe exclamation points?  All too often they're used with deception in mind... because of the inclusion of the exclamation point, you'd think that would be an exciting seminar. You'd be wrong) was a James Woods clone (maybe it actually was James Woods and he's researching the part of a seminar leader for an upcoming movie! How exciting!)  The resemblance was a little spooky, but he was funny at least.  Unfortunately the seminar didn't really address anything I didn't already know, so my notes are 3 pages of doodles and scribbles in a steno notebook.  Afterwards I went to the "librarian mixer" at the convention center and mixed with nobody (I keep reading these articles about how librarians are so cool and hip now, but apparently the trend has not yet hit the Northwest: I was by far the coolest person there.  Not another tattoo in sight, no piercings on any of the guys [all 20-or-so of them], not even so much as an earring.  Everyone wearing their "librarian" clothes while I was dressed in my work shorts and bright orange, trying-to-be-a-Charlie-Brown-shirt-[but-not-quite-succeeding] shirt,  and of course my ever-present, orange-sherbet-colored "Ducksauce" hat [with  an umlaut over the "a"... an umlaut, I tell you... it doesn't get much cooler than that... and a picture of a duck carrying an umbrella]  I felt a little out of place. After the  mixer I met my best friend for dinner and a shopping trip to Powell's (got books 2,3,4 & 5 in Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos: Archives series, Jim  Crace's The Devil's Larder and Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman... I'm not sure what to read first, but it has to wait until I'm finished with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.)

I am exhausted, but luckily I have a word of the day for you:  Craisin.  It was supplied by my very good friend in Seattle, and while I'm not entirely convinced he didn't make it up, he claims it's a cranberry crossed with a raisin.  I'm not sure that that's even possible, but good luck in casually inserting that into a conversation.

Quote of the Day: "There is no cannibalism in the British navy."

Depoe Bay ("Whale-Watching Capital of the World"... I'm not sure what criteria were used to determine this) is having their annual Boat Show and Crab Feed this weekend. I've always wanted to go, but it always falls on the weekend of the annual OLA conference and I'm usually out of town. This year, however, I've changed my mind: I no longer want to have anything to do with the crab feed... and this is the reason: the giant, inflatable crab* they've set up on the north end of town scares the shit out of me. It wouldn't be so bad if it was a giant cartoon crab, but this thing is completely realistic-looking. As I approached it last night, I wasn't sure what it was for a long time, and despite the fact that I don't really believe in giant crabs, my mind started to go all swimmy when it dawned on me that it was a giant crab (until I saw that it was wearing sunglasses... that made everything ok.) I wouldn't be saddened to learn that the crab had been punctured and deflated by hooligans during the night... in fact I wish hooligans would destroy the thing so I could stop having nightmares... woe is me... woe I tell you.

In other news, somehow, without realizing what was happening, I managed to drink 1/2 gallon of milk on my drive from the library to Portland this evening.  And for the first time ever, I went to a Chinese restaurant and ordered cheeseburgers. It used to disgust me when my brothers would do things like this as children, but I was very much not in the mood for Chinese food.  Portland is not particularly known for its Chinese food... it's pretty much dreck.

Quote for the Day: "Just then Jeff, the balding actor famous for his tattooed 'Rebel Rose' and loose-fitting Italian suits, walks by.  He talks to us about... that's right: all the toys he buried in his backyard so nobody else would play with them. He says one of his favorites is his Nick Cave doll.  I feel pity for the man and hope that one day he'll grow hair.  Then I think: 'Wow... they have Nick Cave dolls now... I waaaant one!'"

Word-of-the-Day: Dreck. Use it.


*Note: The giant, inflatable crab pictured here is not the giant, inflatable crab from Depoe Bay (Depoe Bay doesn't have palm trees... and rarely has skies that color... and what's that yellow stuff all over everything?  Sunlight???) The giant, inflatable crab in Depoe Bay is much, much scarier.  Much.

A friend of mine finally convinced me to start a livejournal. I'm not completely sure why I've been resisting this for so long, but I suspect it has something to do with "extreme lethargy" (a condition to which I'm genetically prone and for which there is no imminent cure, but I'm actually not bothered by that.  I'm not proud of my tendency towards laziness, but it's not something I'm ashamed of either... let's just say that I've learned to accept my laziness and have figured out  how to make the best of it.)

I'll begin by explaining my user name: Edgar Allen Poe once wrote that the most beautiful combination of sounds in the English language is "cellar door". Many years later Annie Dillard said that, in her opinion, the most beautiful-sounding word in English is "sycamore".  I liked the idea of combining the two because, as a phrase, "sycamore cellar door" (or "cellar door sycamore") is beautifully alliterative and has a slightly haunting, Southern Gothic lilt and rhythm to it. It's like a little tongue-danse macabre. Alas, livejournal (I find it interesting that the spell check in livejournal can't spell "livejournal"... maybe if I... LiVEJOURNAL... nope), only allows you 15 characters for a user name.  I needed 18 characters.  Poop.  "sycamorecellar" is not quite what I had in mind, but I'll survive (if I must) and try to forge ahead.

If you didn't already have those literary tidbits stuffed away in your brain, I've just added to your ever-expanding trivia-library. You may thank me for your increased knowledge with payment-in-chocolate (but not junk chocolate, you cheapskate... that was quality trivia and deserves quality chocolate in return.)  I'm genuinely hoping your brain won't explode with a surplus of information.  It hurts when it does.  If you're tempted to try to forget what I told you, in order to avoid brain explosions, it's not likely you'll be able to, so I'd advise against the wasted effort (and for some reason, trying to forget something is exponentially more dangerous than just leaving the information alone: it can actually make the information stick harder.) 

I am a librarian on the central Oregon coast (my library is 2 blocks from the Pacific Ocean; I can see the ocean from the staff room where I eat my lunch... I don't know about you, but I think that to be eating lunch at the library where you work and to be able to watch the ocean as you do so... that's like the coolest damned thing I could ever have imagined when I was a kid.)  I'm not technically a Librarian because I don't have an MLS degree (Master of Library Sciences), but I do work full-time in a library as the assistant to the Director (or, as I prefer, I'm the library's "Vice Director"...  just because it sounds like I'm in charge of some diabolical library underworld.  I love the word "diabolical".  I'd like everyone reading this to make a sincere effort to use "diabolical", as naturally as possible, in at least one conversation today) and that's sufficient in my book (a book not cataloged by this or any other library, but a good book nonetheless: you should try to find a copy and read it) to justify calling myself a librarian with a little "l". 

You may have noticed I really like parentheses... I mean I really like them, possibly in an unhealthy way that makes some people queasy and that would be frowned upon by many of the world's major religions (which I find unfair because it seems to me that most of the world's major religions see life as parenthetical.  An afterthought.  An aside.  A footnote to "God's Great Plan".)  Don't panic, you'll either come to accept my affinity for parentheses, or you'll give up and move on to the ramblings of a more linear-thinking blogger. I won't be offended either way. I also like ellipses (...and nothing beats the parenthetical ellipsis.)  Wanna know what else makes my heartstrings go zing, zing, zing?  The accent grave (but not the accent aigu), the accent circonflexe and the umlaut.  English doesn't use nearly enough diacritical marks, so I've decided to change my name to either Ho(umlaut)bbes or Ho(circonflexe)bbes.  That's it.  Just one word.  Like Cher or Madonna, Raffi or Bono.  I'm tending toward the circonflexe, but since it indicates a missing "s", it may be less deceptive to go with the umlaut (but then again,  there's that whole Heavy Metal Umlaut trend from the 80s, and I'm not much of a metal-head [and I'd hate for people to mistake me for one just because of an ill-considered umlaut {ah! brackets! and now those bird-things too!}], so maybe I'd better go with the circonflexe and hope that only a handful of people will know what it means...)  I'm not terribly fond of the exclamation point (I know, you've glanced back a couple of lines and said to yourself: "Ha! Exclamation points!", but let me repeat: I'm not fond of them; I didn't say that I don't use them.  I see the necessity of their use on rare occasions, and despite my desperate desire to insert something, anything, other than an exclamation point, I sometimes have to concede that using one is unavoidable.)  I do like cheese quite a lot.  My room mate is amazed that I'm ever able to defecate because of the amount of cheese that I eat (and she's not even aware of the cheese I eat at work.)  Few are surprised that I'm more than a little bit overweight (which is a euphemism for "fat") when they observe how much cheese I consume on a daily basis.  To me, a day without cheese really isn't worth living through and ought to be spent in bed. I'm very fond of Chocolate too, but I haven't had the courage yet to try combining the two (chocolate and cheese, that is... I've combined chocolate with parentheses on many occasions, and, a little less frequently, chocolate with ellipses.  You will never find me combining chocolate with an exclamation point.  I've been experimenting a little with chocolate and accents graves, accents circonflexes and umlauts, but really am not prepared to share the results yet. I have a bacon-chocolate candy bar at home, but that's really neither here nor there.  If anyone has a good chocolate-and-cheese recipe, I'd be interested in seeing it, though I won't guarantee I'll make it.)

That was possibly the most exhausting paragraph I've ever written.  Sometimes my sentences resemble one of those ungodly (or "diabolical") equations from advanced algebra that feel like a map of the NY City subway system, the maps you study diligently until you're sure you know which trains to take to Lincoln Center, but somehow you end up in Queens (the maps are all twisted and braid-y... but like a tangled braid that's been slept on for a few days and is starting to come loose and is looking less and less like a braid and more and more like an impending unnatural disaster in hair.  If you'd just brush your hair every night and then re-braid it in the morning, this kind of thing could be avoided), and takes a good half-hour to sort out.

Right now I'm trying really hard to avoid working.  It's Monday, and I tend to prefer to let my work pile up on my desk until at least Thursday, then do it all in a panic.  Panic motivates me.  This week, though, I'm only working one-and-a-half days because I'm attending a library conference in Vancouver (WA, not B.C.) for three days.  While that is work, my boss won't be there and it doesn't involve filing or decision-making or smiling-when-I-don't-feel-like-it (though, ironically, because I won't be at work, I probably will feel like smiling and will have wasted a golden opportunity to practice my "grim face".)  I'm looking forward to my trip not because of the conference itself but because I'll be staying with my ex- and his new boyfriend for three nights.  If this sounds like an especially masochistic form of self-torture, I understand and appreciate your apprehensions on my behalf, but my ex- and I were together for seven mostly excellent years and broke up a year ago under pretty amicable circumstances (as far as break-ups go) and I miss him and I really like his new boyfriend and I really am looking forward to spending time with them.  So there. (If I could figure out how to spell the sound of sticking my tongue out at you and spitting, I'd insert that sound here.)

I just returned this morning from a little over half-a-weekend in Portland staying with my best friend and his boyfriend and had a really great time with both of them.  We went to see a traveling production of Sweeney Todd (Thank God the production actually stayed in one place while we were viewing it and only resumed its journey once the audience had left the theater.  I have a tendency toward motion sickness and was a little apprehensive about what might happen if I was forced to watch a play that was chugging along through the streets of Portland.  I also get winded pretty fast: I am fat. Apparently "traveling production" refers to something else entirely.  More trivia for you... keep it safe) and while I wasn't quite sure what to expect, I have to admit that I was very pleasantly surprised. I was especially pleased by the actress who played Mrs. Lovett: she was the best of the 3 Mrs. Lovetts I've seen so far (the three being Angela Lansbury, Helena Bonham Carter and whatsername... whoever the woman was we saw yesterday.)  Sweeney Todd is without-a-doubt my favorite of all of Sondheim's musicals (then for second place it's a tie between A Little Night Music and Sunday in the Park with George), and this may have been my favorite production of it.  And with that preceding statement, I think I've just outed myself on livejournal and it's only my first day! (Justified, absolutely necessary exclamation point.)

Ok... my friend who convinced me to start a livejournal told me that he skips long posts, so I'm gonna stop here (besides, I really should try to do some work today.)  You'd better read this through though, Mister- the whole thing.  If anyone besides him objects to the length or content of this post, you can reach him here to register your complaints*.

(One last thing:  I really hate it when I rip off a nice, melodious fart in my office and then look out the window to see a queue of staff waiting to come in and visit...)

(One more last thing: Spiny Dinosaur Balls.)

*You can stop trying to click this "link" now... it just takes you in circles and it could make you dizzy. I like my friend (hence the use of the word "friend" and not "diabolical arch-nemesis") and don't want to make him sad :-(