Where Have I Been?

The wind's gone out of my sails a bit, because I may have found a viable answer to that great What's Next in life. I realized that I never like being without a What's Next as it tends to make me appreciate where I'm at a little more. And it means there's not a huge, unending expanse of 9-5 in my future, necessarily - actually, nothing was worse than the feeling of starting my first professional position, knowing that it wasn't going to end anytime soon and that I'd be reluctantly handing away 40 hours of my precious time every week toward a schedule that was so routine and confined, so different than anything else I'd experienced previously, with the possible exception of K-12, and, well, I still had nightmares about that particular prison sentence.

My new What's Next is multipronged, and won't begin immediately. And, truly, I'm still thinking about whether or not I should actually do this.

I'm thinking about going back to school.

Where to begin. Folks, when I was in Portland, I was at Powell's City of Books and realized the one section I pored desperately over was Urban Studies. Not information science or any permutation thereof, not YA literature or even graphic novels. The next morning a serendipitous walk brought me to the door of the College of Urban and Public Affairs at Portland State. A little key started turning in my head - could this be my ticket out of New Jersey?

I feel compelled to add that I don't hate New Jersey in the way I thought I hated Missoula. I'm not rejecting it because it's different, because it's not home, because I can't live the kind of lifestyle here I'm accustomed to. I'm a seasoned relocator now, and I recognize those kinds of judgements. The Shore is the Shore, and although plenty of people love it here, it will never be my home. I've learned a lot from it though, and I've learned a lot at my job, and I'm going to continue learning a lot here because I'm not going to bolt and sign up for classes at PDX next fall, as my flight instinct is telling me to.

No, I think I'm going to stay here a bit longer and make sure this isn't a passing interest. I'm going to think about it, I'm going to investigate my potential career options in Urban and Regional Planning (like I didn't with library and information science).

Here are a few things I'm thinking about.

1. The guilt that says, if you're going to do an urban studies degree, you should do it in Cleveland, where you'll be surrounded by the urban problems you're intending on fixing (my rebuttal: I think given its tendency toward being a black hole for young upstarts with dreams - you can argue with me on that if you like - perhaps Cleveland could particularly benefit from skills I might learn elsewhere.)
2. Money. Though I'm the kind of person who can be satisfied with a folding chair, an air mattress, and a couple of plates, I've quite gotten used to having a normal income. Plus, I've never had student loan debt and I don't intend on it, and I don't intend on dipping much into my savings to finance this degree. Which means it would take some creative financial planning.
3. Do I want to become a perpetual student? Isn't there sort of a pathetic denial about people that just keep going back to school? On the other hand, I have a coworker who did this for 20 years. He has 2 bachelor's degrees and 3 master's degrees. He is also the most well-adjusted, cheerful person I've ever met, and looks about 15 years younger than he actually is. Hmmm. Maybe I'll have what he's having.
4. Do I really need a degree in Urban and Regional Planning to be part of the solution in Cleveland, or is this just an excuse to reject adulthood, which I still want no part of?
   

Oh, I also seem to have left out the following factor: my boyfriend is moving to Queens and I probably will move there with him for a while. So my timeline is looking like this:

1. Stay at Ocean County Library for a while longer.
2. Live in New York.
3. Go back to school in Portland.

In other words, there's potentially a couple of years between #1 and #3. Which brings up another question: what the hell am I going to do in New York? I never, never intended on living there.

So although I've already heard some surprising responses from those closest to me (including my dad somewhat wistfully yearning for his perpetual student days - I thought for sure he'd be the first person to talk me out of this), and although most of you out there have never actually met me, what do you guys think?

Paint the Bathrooms Pink

Explaining my absence: I got back from Portland late last night and when I'm on vacation I'm on vacation from the Internet as well.

Here are just a few quick observations about the Rose City that I feel compelled to get out before morning at the sprawling shore embleakens my civic vision:

1. Driving is inconvenient, which forces people to walk or take public transportation.
2. Walking makes you feel good. Even though it's always raining in PDX, people are out walking and they're happy about it.
3. Portland's downtown is more approachable and less stifling than Cleveland's.
4. It's the neighborhoods directly around downtown that make it livable.
5. OMG - there are grocery stores you can actually walk to.
6. Everything is deliberately beautiful - even the bathrooms are painted in bright colors.
7. Portland doesn't seem to have the race/class divide in such a big way as Cleveland.
8. Espresso is everywhere. I have yet to experience a correctly made espresso drink here on the East Coast.
9. I saw liberal bumper stickers again. (Seriously guys, I hadn't seen the "Practice Abstinence: No Bush, No Dick" one. NJ may be a blue state but I'm in the reddest part.) And there was one house that still had a Kucinich For President yard sign.
10. Finally, cryptically, God bless the humble huckleberry.

More later.

Tomorrow Is My Birthday

And I find myself paying less and less attention to the big issues of the world, as I'm distracted more and more by the Judge Judies, Michael Jacksons, American Idols, and various media-highlighted crimes against children that I know are blown out of proportion and not representative of what's going on in the world at large. I'm in my own world now, a world where I'm almost like, "George W. who?" I wonder if other lefties out there have drifted into this self-absorbed oblivion since November. I wonder if this is the way conservatives felt six months into the Clinton administration.

Maybe a trip to the Blue Moon Tavern will make me feel better.

See, I Told You

Epodunk.com has a map showing the most underfunded libraries in the country.

Notice there are no little red dots in Ohio. Libraries are probably the only thing Ohio has going for it right now. Email this map to your legislators. Email this map to that big grinning idiot Bob Taft.

Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?

Another thing to love about Ohio....

You (yes, you!) can actually participate in the American Dream of homeownership without being Donald Trump.

Compare the house that my friend Ruth recently bought for $169,000 in Portage County:



Look, it comes with a pond:



A mother-in-law apartment:



A barn:



And can you spy the end of her property? I can't!



Whereas here on the Shore, look what you can get for the exact same price:



(No, they don't both come in the same box. If you don't believe me, check out the listing on Realtor.com - yes, it does say 650 square feet - you're not imagining it!)

Eggshells of Our Own Construction, Or, Race in Cleveland

Maybe someday if I start having aspirations about running for mayor in Cleveland, I'll wish I hadn't written this. After all, one day I will be a middle aged white lady, just like Jane Campbell. Those readers out there who have met me personally - I'll point the finger at you - know that I wouldn't run Cleveland remotely like Jane Campbell does. Yet to many in Cleveland, in twenty years, when I have crow's feet and and the telltale Lily Munster grey streak that runs in my family, though I may be the candidate with the most unique and progressive plan, I will be nothing but Jane Campbell reincarnated.

I'm not in the business of pointing fingers, but to anyone that would want the perspective of someone who's now been away from Cleveland for nearly a year, here it is. Let me just say that I think about Cleveland almost all the time, and I think about it hard and long and turn Cleveland's problems over and over in my mental "hands" looking for the part that's broken, the part that can be pulled off and replaced. I think about what's wrong with Cleveland, what could fix Cleveland, what forces are at work that make it not function at its best. Every new good idea I encounter leads me to think, what's at work here that we could strip away and use to make Cleveland better?

See how much I have invested in this?

So, OK. I worked at the Shaker Heights Public Library for two years. I grew up on the West Side, and because of our bizarre fractiousness, I knew absolutely nothing about Shaker Heights (beyond the fact that it was there) until I was 24 and started working there.

Within a week I had made the vague but crystal clear determination that there were "weird energies" at play in Shaker Heights, and its immediate environs. (For those of you who aren't familiar with Cleveland, or for those Clevelanders who haven't ventured west of the Cuyahoga River, there seems to be more black/white tension on the East Side - where Shaker Heights is located - than the West Side, perhaps for the simple reason that there are more black people on the East Side).

Oh, God. Where do I go from here? The white community thinks, would "you people" just get over it, already? The black community thinks, white folks are still holding us down. Who's right? The best answer I can give is that nobody's right, because when you get down to it, there is no such thing as the white community or the black community, only individual white people and black people, with individual wounds that are either discussed or denied. And mostly, I haven't seen much discussion, just a lot of walking on what I consider unnecessary eggshells of our own construction. In two years at the Shaker Heights Library, racism was never discussed openly, not once. We never had a staff meeting about what to do when the race card got played (by black, white, or whatever kind of people), there was little acknowledgement on behalf of the administration that the public service staff often worked in a minefield of racial incidents waiting to happen.

I'm not saying that to be a bitch, or to particularly criticize the library, as opposed to any other Cleveland area institution. In fact, I fiercely loved my coworkers there - more than they ever knew. But I, as an outsider, wandered into this situation and saw clearly that there was racial tension and that it was not being addressed. Which, in retrospect, could have been a particularly damaging management tactic for me to learn, because at the time I was a new, inexperienced professional.

Am I being too sensitive? Am I imagining these things? Am I being racist by saying them? In Cleveland, we don't know what we can say. In fact, anything we say makes us look bad to somebody, so we say nothing. In the end, it's a stupid game that hurts everybody.

I'll share something I've learned from the Ocean County (NJ) Library, where I work now.

OCL has this big Diversity Initiative. We celebrate and promote every ethnicity possible through our collections, outreach, and programming.

Which seems, on the surface, very weird because Ocean County is about the whitest, most homogeneous place I've ever been to. Seriously, sometimes it makes me want to throw up. You can look at this Diversity Initiative and laugh, or scoff, or scratch your head and say, "why on earth are we talking about diversity and pretending we're diverse when we really aren't?"

I'll be honest with you, I often think that myself.

But really, this initiative is so profound I've really only been able to fully grasp its profundity and the amazing, progressive foresight that must have been involved with its conception a few brief times.

My supervisor, a lifelong Ocean County resident, told me (when I expressed unease at how insular Ocean County can seem) that "civilization came late to Ocean County." As in, blatant acts of racism were publicly condoned and encouraged until relatively recently. She said that the library, a major, major force in the community, has chosen (via the Diversity Initiative) to not just prepare homogeneous Ocean County for the diversity that will, ultimately, become the norm, but inundate it. Get the forces in motion to bombard the generations to come with positive images of diversity, so the roots of fear won't have a chance to take hold. Because if they do nothing, diversity will come anyway - that's just the nature of civilization - and those roots of fear will grow, and create the kind of problems that Cleveland has.

Writing about race in Cleveland is hard, and tiring, and I wish I could make this a fraction as cohesive and persuasive as the piece I wrote about libraries last week. I have to think about this some more, as we all do, and I suppose the one feeble prescription I can offer (and really, who am I to be dealing prescriptions for social ills?) is that someone has to start talking about it. No. Everyone has to start talking about it, all the time, in widely publicized, nonconfrontational fora. This isn't something you can have a symposium on once, and expect it to go away. Maybe once a year, instead.

Or once a month.

Or once a week.

Or every day.

Lucky 14

Forbes Magazine recently released the 2005 Best Places for Business and Careers report. They've ranked 150 large and 168 smaller U.S. metro areas according to such indices as cost of doing business, cost of living, crime rate, educational attainment, job growth, etc.

There's also a Culture & Leisure Index, which ranks cities according to the number of "museums, theaters, golf course, sports teams and other activities" available.

Of 150 large metro areas, Cleveland ranks #14 on the Culture & Leisure Index. That's on a list where numbers 1, 2, and 3 are Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, respectively.

Just another statistic you can bandy about when you find yourself amongst those who complain that there's nothing to do in Cleveland.

Getting up is a sucker's game

When you wake from a dream that a) you walk into a cafeteria full of retarded people who are all eating sardine burritos and b) you're watching an infomercial for a new space-age diaper that will allow the rich and incontinent to swill in their Jacuzzis without worrying about "gastrointestinal leakage", you know that a) you shouldn't go to bed right after drinking that Beach Bum Martini and b) you should no longer aspire to be like Charlie Bucket's grandparents.

It's time to get up.

On Libraries: No Really, Don't Stop Reading

Once, I saw a coworker in a random spot about 40 miles from where we both lived and worked. I was agitated. I really don't like it when my personal and professional lives conjoin in unexpected locations.

Which is why I tend never to mention the "L" word on RBCA. The "L" word is for NexGen Librarian. If you are interested in my thoughts on the "L" word, go there. This is my space. EBSCOHost, Internet guest passes, and Free Money to Quit Your Job: keep out!

But when I remember that I wasn't always in a place where library funding is unlimited, my two lives come together with a bang. And for the last week I've been mulling over the piece from Cool Cleveland (see Library Liability) and its responses (in this week's issue, Cleveland of the Mind - see Yr Turn), and Ohio legislature 'logic': Nice libraries; Let's get 'em [thanks Stephen]. The part that grabbed me from the latter PD column was this:

"Ask anyone who moves out of Ohio, especially parents: One of the first things they miss, besides grandparents left behind, are the fantastic libraries - treasure-houses for children, people's universities for adults, workshops for the very brand of "by-the-bootstraps" self-improvement Ohio's Republicans say they want to promote."


You may not realize this, but Ohio has the best public libraries in the country. That's because of the Library and Local Government Support Fund (LLGSF), a statewide honeypot that essentially distributes dollars equitably among richer and poorer districts, allowing a sort of leveling of the playing field so that libraries in seriously depressed areas (like Southeast Ohio) will not have to close their doors when local levies fail.

Now, equal access sounds nice and all, but I don't think the taxpaying public at large understands much about what public libraries are for. Yes, they're for story time, and for getting Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince without having to pay for it. But they aren't just for pleasure reading. It troubles me when people think that library supporters only support libraries "so that our neediest citizens can read as much as the well-off" (italics mine), as Michael Bowers does in "Why have libraries when books on sale are cheap, accessible?":

"I thought government was to put out fires and defend the borders. Not to give us stuff to read. I mean, thanks to the private sector, it's already everywhere you look. If I simply bought one copy of every magazine offered at the corner Mobil station — covering everything from Kawasaki motorcycles to Esquire women we love to Forbes financial advice — I'd be reading for the next year.

Yet, now the poor taxpayers in Orland Park [Illinois] are stuck three times over. First, they paid for an unneeded library. Then, they paid for an unneeded bookmobile. And now, they must pay the $8.5 million bill to settle the lawsuit over the 2001 bookmobile crash that left a man brain-damaged.

All this foolishness could have been avoided if government had just stayed out of the library business in the first place."

Now, to the untrained eye, the eye which has no idea what public libraries are for, this might seem like a good idea. Get rid of the library so low-income families who don't like to read anyway won't be so burdened with the relatively piddly little tax that pays the local reference librarian's $27,000/year salary (that librarian, I might add, is also not some kid they plucked off the street to occupy desk space. She's educated up the wazoo).

Indeed, those untrained eyes might also fall upon "Public Libraries an Expensive Relic" by Jim Trageser of the North County (California) Times. Trageser tries to convince his readership that they should ditch plans to build a new library and invest in a community-wide WiFi network instead, "so that all citizens may have unfettered access to the virtually unlimited library that is the Internet." (If you think that all information is available, for free, on the Internet, I'm just going to tell you nicely - because some librarians wouldn't be so nice - that you're very wrong.)

So it disturbs me that increasingly plagued Ohioans, trained to hate the "T" word, even though the "T" word is just a way of paying for services that make life better for all, might soon also be plagued by this kind of nonsense about what libraries are for, in an effort to justify cutting the LLGSF. The same way that they've learned to justify funding cuts to public schools because teachers need to be taught "fiscal responsibility."

So, in the hopes of answering this kind of ridiculous talk before it starts, I shall demonstrate, by way of listing some recent questions I've had at the reference desk, exactly why the practices of buying books and using the Internet will never, ever replace the public library:

1. "My teacher said I have to find a newspaper article on J.M. Barrie from the New York Times. It has to be from 1913. And I have to use a microfilm machine."
2. "There was an article on the front page of the Passaic County (NJ) newspaper in October of 1980 or 1981. I can tell you what it was about, but I don't know the name of the article or the exact date. Can you help me find it?"
3. "I need to find out what plumbers were listed in the Ocean County (NJ) yellow pages in 1993."
4. "Can you find an obituary for my grandfather - he died somewhere in New Jersey in 1967."
5. "I need 5 book sources on gay marriage. My teacher said I couldn't use anything from the Internet." (Would you really encourage a low-income 14 year old to go out and purchase 5 books for a 2-page assignment?)

I also want to respond to this statement in Trageser's column:

"While it's true that not everyone owns a computer today, prices have dropped to the point than one can now purchase an Internet-ready home computer for less than the cost of a color television. Even computers too old and slow to run the latest games or business software are more than adequate for surfing the Web, checking e-mail or newsgroups, or instant messaging.

What removes these resources from the reach of low-income families isn't so much the lack of a computer as it is the lack of access to the Internet."


You can have a computer, you can have Internet access, but it doesn't mean you know what to do with them. Most public librarians I've talked to have had at least one experience with someone picking up a mouse and pointing it at the computer monitor like it's some kind of remote control. Ask any public librarian and they'll tell you that if they only had a dime for every time someone approached the reference desk prefacing their question with, "Now I don't know anything about computers, but I need to find...." Just yesterday I did a two hour, one-on-one tutorial with a woman who needed to learn to use Microsoft Word because she realized that she just wasn't going to get ahead in the workplace if she didn't know how to use computers. Who else is going to help these people?


Who is there to provide a solution when your teenage kid's report is due tomorrow and you have to find 10 full-text articles on the effects of poverty on education?

Who is there to pick up the pieces when Free Money dreams are dashed, Matthew Lesko is exposed as a complete charlatan, and yet you still need to find a low-rate personal loan so you can continue to pay for your elderly parent's care?

In conclusion, you need to understand that people come to the library when they're desperate. They need tax forms that were due yesterday. They need a divorce, and don't know where to start. They need to find out what the local ordinances are on barking dogs. They need to register to vote, to fill out a Golden Buckeye application, to get a passport. They are often in a state of panic, are irate, distracted, and in a hurry. They need something that somebody told them the library had, whether the library has it or not. They don't always need something to read on the beach. In fact, that's a very, very small part of what I, as a reference librarian, handle every day.

Being a librarian doesn't mean we're sitting around reading. Though I enjoy what I do, at its worst, it can be a difficult, draining, unpleasant job: again, ask any public librarian and they'll tell you they've had at least one experience with that roving artiste whose medium is fecal matter and whose canvas is the restroom wall. (It would now take two hands to count how many times I, personally, have encountered this - I was also lucky enough to once happen upon five large splotches of human ejaculate on the carpet in the 300's. Whoever thought that personal finance could be so arousing?) This is a job that can require daily contact with the mentally disturbed, or at least daily contact with patrons who could double as extras in a David Lynch film. Don't get me wrong, it often feels good to get people what they need, to know you're helping someone that clearly has nowhere else to turn, but it can be frigging hard, too.

Perhaps Bob Taft himself would like to offer his services, if Ohio libraries should begin closing their doors. I, myself, would find inordinate glee in trying to watch him deal with the screaming lady who needs the phone number to the DMV so she can complain about how rudely she was treated by one of their employees.

So, please, if you find yourselves amid the kind of company that begins wondering aloud, "why do we need libraries, anyway?" -- point them to this. Hell, I don't care if you print out a thousand copies of my humble little missive, fashion them into paper airplanes, and climb to the top of the Terminal Tower and let 'em float indignantly down onto the heads of the dozen or so panhandlers below.

Because, after all, one of those panhandlers might pick it up and think, hmm, I never thought of going to the library to ask for help.

And Furthermore....

Amid all the yap about how Cleveland will never be New York or San Francisco or Wherever, it's important to remember that New York and San Francisco and Wherever were not always what they are now.

I've been doing a little bit of reading in preparation for my trip to everyone's favorite walkable, sustainable, progressive place: Portland. And lo and behold, right here on page 4 of The Insiders' Guide to Portland, Oregon (2nd ed.) I learn that:

"After the world wars, Portland thrived, but by the late 60s the city was faced with serious economic problems."

Sounds familiar. I read on:

"Due to environmental concerns and international competition, its economy, dependent on timber and Pacific fisheries, spiraled downward. The decline of these two major industries affected secondary service and retail businesses."

OK, I'm getting it, replace timber and fish with steel, and you get the Cleveland Story. But here's what they had that we don't - A Plan (that worked):

"In 1973, the city council and planners came up with the Downtown Plan, a vision that reinvigorated local retail, housing, entertainment, and government. A westside freeway was torn down [I know, isn't this ERIE-ly familiar?] and redirected...and [a Waterfront park] was built along the edge of the Willamette River. Other major changes that dynamically rearranged Portland were a downtown transit mall...light rail connecting to the outerEastside and Pioneer Square, and a central open space for community events."

In Cleveland, there's a ton of infighting about what the Plan should be (I know, I really have to tell you that, right?). Do we have gambling, tear down the Shoreway, build yuppie condos downtown, sink Whiskey Island, fill in the lake with a giant parking lot, what? I give the Planning Commission credit, because even though I don't agree with all of their ideas, they are dealing with the biggest group of change-hating contrarians ever to descend from the trees (and even convincing them to try out the ground for a change was hard.) I know because I am one. So is my dear friend Kevin, a fellow ex-pat, who will come home and drive around and see that an old favorite pizza place is gone and indignantly declare, "I don't acknowledge this change!"

It takes a lot of bravery and spirit to get past that. Even for someone like me, who wants to see Cleveland get better (I always had an odd sentimental attachment to the Shoreway). But the smartest and most reflective among us can do it. We need a plan, a good plan, a plan that doesn't feel like it's leaving people out or displacing them or plugging in a random yuppie here and there and calling that progress. A single, encompassing plan instead of lots of little mini projects whose edges will undoubtedly come together in discordant and destructive ways.

I'm going to spend some time thinking about what my plan would be, if I were king of the forest. Are you up to that challenge?