“People see what they want to see.”

So I was all excited when I saw the following link while procrastinating from doing any work on the Reference Desk tonight:

Scientists discover a nearly Earth-sized planet

Swell, I thought, excited as I clicked on the link — but then the article, unsurprisingly in hindsight, brought up a pet peeve of mine and left me feeling rather cross. To wit:

Gliese 581 e sits close to the nearest star, making it too hot to support life. Still, Mayor said its discovery in a solar system 20 1/2 light years away from Earth is a “good example that we are progressing in the detection of Earth-like planets.”

Scientists also discovered that the orbit of planet Gliese 581 d, which was found in 2007, was located within the “habitable zone” — a region around a sun-like star that would allow water to be liquid on the planet’s surface, Mayor said.

This, as Xander would say, highly grates my cheese. Why do we assume that alien life forms could never evolve in uber-hot temperatures? Why do we think that life from another world is going to need water? Couldn’t a form of life evolve that needs hydrogen the way we need oxygen, or that is actually allergic to water? Has no one seen “Signs”?

All our knowledge of life comes from our own Earth’s carbon-based life forms. I’m no scientist, but as a science fictionist, it strikes me as outrageously limiting (by which I mean stupid) to assume only carbon-based life can evolve. Man, haven’t they ever read Crichton?

Malcolm sighed. … “Don’t you know about oxygen?”

“I know it’s necessary for life.”

“It is now,” Malcolm said. “But oxygen is actually a metabolic poison. It’s a corrosive gas, like fluorine, which is used to etch glass. And when oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells — say, around three billion years ago — it created a crisis for all other life on our planet. Those plant cells were polluting the environment with a deadly poison. They were exhaling a lethal gas, and building up its concentration. A planet like Venus has less than one percent oxygen. One earth, the concentration of oxygen was going up rapidly — five, ten, eventually twenty-one percent! Earth had an atmosphere of pure poison! Incompatible with life!”

How do we know what aliens will need what we need to survive? Or what they will be made up of? We don’t know how life started on _this_ planet yet,* and yet we’ve decided that the way life works here must be how life works on other planets?? In other solar systems, in other galaxies?!

I always applaud science fiction authors who try to make their aliens break out of the mold, like Madeleine L’Engle’s “Aunt Beasts” who don’t possess the sense of sight (why we think aliens would necessarily evolve the same senses as us never made sense to me either; there are animals on THIS planet who have evolved different senses, for criminey’s sake). Or that episode of “Doctor Who,” where the Doctor realizes that the alien trying to attack them is fighting back from its home in the heart of a star. (That would be “42,” which has a _great_ name.) I often wondered if we’d even be able to _see_ aliens, or smell them, or sense them in any other way — they may have evolved in a way that leaves them undetectable to us, as rays of energy or shadows or something we can’t even fathom to imagine.

I know boo-all about biology, it’s true, and I’m sure scientists would be lining up to tell me why all this is impossible and completely incompatible with what we know about life. But we don’t know boo about life. It’s all theories, all based on our very limited observations of our own planet’s life. And we don’t even understand life here. We don’t know whether or not viruses are actually alive, and we can’t agree on the definition of a gene. We don’t understand how our own brains work yet, for cryin’ out loud.

Once we leave Earth with our observations, I imagine all bets are off.

Where we get the idea that the Earth standard for life is the Universe’s standard for life is beyond me. And I keep thinking, if we didn’t limit ourselves with such definitions, we might find what we’re looking for a little bit faster. (Not MUCH faster — we still need to make some big technological leaps, just due to the vast distances we’re talking about when it comes to these discovers — but a bit.)

And, in the meantime, these articles would stop driving my inner Trekkie fan so crazy. Which is ironic, considering 9/10ths of the Trek verse aliens consist of humans with funny foreheads — bless them.

(And, one day, I will FINALLY get my new blog set up, and post entries on these things more than once a decade …)

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* Are we still clinging to that “lightening hit a puddle of primordial goop” theory? Because, I mean, c’mon. I always thought that the Big Bang Theory is kind of a weak one, but it looks like logical genius compared to the Primordial Goop Lightening Effect Suggestion.

“I couldn’t change the world, I knew that — but I could fix little pieces of it.”

I had a disheartening day at work yesterday — it was one of those Mondays where you’re tired and apathetic and spend most of the day just trying to stay awake and marking off the hours until it’s time to go home. There was stuff I could have been doing — stuff I should have been doing — but most of my energy was going into trying to stay awake and trying not to feel like my entire job is a waste of energy.

It was one of Those Mondays, too, where I was questioning what the hell I thought I’d be doing with my job when I decided to become a librarian, and what the hell I actually accomplish now that I am one. And I’d gotten to the part of the despair where I was feeling more or less like a glorified program director — which is the part of the job that I hate the most — and not even a particularly good one.

And then I made the mistake of reading the Annoyed Librarian’s postings about library school, and in particular a post written giving ‘advice’ to those currently considering a profession in libraries. It was particularly rotten because the library science student who wrote the email inspiring the post said some very familiar things, like, “In my heart I’m clinging to the idea of working in the libraries because of my love for books (I know, I know …it’s stupid) and sharing that love with others.”

That’s why I got into this profession, and what do I do all day? I hold video game programs and perform unsuccessful outreach events at the local high school, that’s what. There’s nothing wrong with these tasks, either, but it’s not what I’m good at and it’s not what I wanted to be doing when I signed up for the Year of Hell that library school is. I wanted to do this job because I wanted to help people, teens especially. I wanted to help them find Stories that would help through their lives the way such Stories have helped me. The Master says, “Life is not a support system for art. It’s the other way around.” I wanted to be a gatekeeper to that support system. And it really seemed, as a would-be published author, to be the ultimate day job for me. And on the more mundane days — for great moments of job satisfaction don’t come every day, I know that — I hoped at least to be the gatekeeper of information, helping people find the answers they need.

But most days, I don’t do even that. Most days, I clear copier jams and unfreeze computers and make change for print jobs and put up flyers for programs that kids may or may not come to. I sit at tables outside of school cafeterias for an hour and a half to get three kids to sign up for cards. I tell people where the bathrooms are. I try to organize my hopelessly cluttered office. Why bother with it all?? Who am I helping?

A rough night did little to improve my mood (Inner Monk says: Never eat food when you think you shouldn’t; if you have a hunch it might be suspect, it probably is.) I took half a sick day and came in today in time for my turn at the Reference Desk, feeling queasy and achy and wishing I’d just stayed home.

A call came through to the desk after I’d been here only a few minutes, from a woman who had apparently called earlier today with the same question. She was looking for information on home programming kits for helping children practice creative writing. I was in no mood for that broad a question, or the detailed information she started spouting out about how she wanted to buy such a kit for her granddaughter, her brilliant granddaughter who’s been writing stories since the girl was four. And about how well traveled her granddaughter is, and how smart and clever and talented, and how her experience would make for good stories. But I’m not feeling well, lady, I just want to find you the information and get going; I don’t need all these details.

I find a site — CreativeWritingForKids.com — that has a whole program of exercises, which you can purchase for not a particularly large sum. It includes a lot of different forms of writing, though this woman is really just looking for short story practice, but I’m not feeling well and it’s been a long thirty-six hours and a longer night and there’s so much out there to weed through and this seems like the best I can do today. And she’s thankful, anyway, saying that this is perfect, just perfect, because it includes a short story lesson and it’s short stories she wants.

The website doesn’t give a telephone number, but it does give an email address, and she can do that. So I read her the email (it takes a few tries to get it clear that it’s “von.com” and not “box.com,” but we manage it in the end) and remind her of the program name. At least I found something semi-helpful for her, and the call can end …

“Oh, thank you,” she says. And then, suddenly, “I’m going in for breast surgery and chemotherapy soon.” I draw up, silent, on the other end. “I’m 78 and I’m having surgery and I’ll be getting massive radiation treatments. And my granddaughter, I — I want to …” She’s crying now.

“To give her something?” I say.

“Yes,” she says, still crying, and I wish her luck with the program, that it turns out to be what she needs, and she hangs up, quickly, before I can not-think of anything else to say. And I’m wishing that I’d been more helpful, because there’s no denying how much she’s just helped me.

The Master speaks

I have never been so happy in my entire life. I want to stand up and punch the air and scream and sing and learn how to do cartwheels so I can, well, do cartwheels:

“Stephen King On ‘Twilight’ Author: ‘Stephenie Meyer Can’t Write Worth A Darn'”

Key Moment of Joy (emphasis mine):

“Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people… The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”

I want to get it put on a t-shirt.

He has plenty more to say on exactly why her books are so popular — I think he’s 100% right, for the record (though he said it with far less bile than I would have) — but the important bit was right there, mates.

Ever since starting my anti-Twilight crusade, I’ve longed to know what the Master’s* opinion of this dreck was, and frequently Googled “Stephen King Stephenie Meyer” or “Stephen King Twilight series” hoping to find out. The only results I ever got back, however, were Stephenie Meyer multiple links to the Stephenie Meyer quote, ”I just know I’m too much of a wuss for Stephen King’s books,” (that’s what you want to hear from a popular writer who writes stories about “vam”pires) (and check out her mention to actual scrapbooking) and Stephen King once remarking in the publishing world’s failure to count Meyer on the bestseller list with her “Twilight” series because her audience is primarily teens. He wasn’t sticking up for her so much as for YA authors in general, and how, essentially, they need to be given bigger props — which made me feel a little better; at least he wasn’t a fan of her writing the way he is of Rowling’s. But still, I wanted to hear him say something more, calling the books out for the dreck that they are. And I’d really given up on hearing from him about it; I figured that either they were too far off his radar screen for him to have read one, or maybe he just didn’t want to comment on then out of, I dunno, pity or something.

And then, THIS. I’m so happy I think I could cry. You can bet I’ll be buying that March 6-8 issue of USA Weekend and framing it.

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* Stephen King is my hero/idol/writing-icon, if anyone was unaware of this.

“It is my philosophy that … there is room for all philosophies.”

So I have pretty much given up on my book club (a teen program I run at my library) in terms of actually discussing the assigned book, because none of the kids who show up have ever read the book. Unless, mind you, it’s Paolini’s “Brisingr” or Meyer’s wretched-ass “Breaking Dawn,” the only two books anyone who’s come to the meeting had actually read in the last six or seven school-months’ worth of book choices. And no, it’s not a question of me picking books they don’t want to read — I pick some of the books, they pick some of the books, and either way, it turns out they forget, can’t make the meeting, or simply do not have time to read the books — which, given their current levels of daily homework assignments, I can’t blame them for.

Most of the time, what I’ve done is read the book and devised questions based on the book’s general themes, because if you keep it general enough, the group doesn’t have to have read that particular book to spend an hour thinking about what it was trying to say. We talked about spontaneity and living in the present with Spinell’s “Smiles to Go,” and popularity and being an outsider with the short story collection “Outside Rules: Short Stories About Noncomformist Youth,” and family and (really) whether or not we’d want to live in a parallel dimension where things are different from how our own lives turned out with Lawrence’s “A Crack in the Line.” To be fair, they actually read the non-Meyer/Paolini books in the summer (Card’s “Ender’s Game” and Jenkins’s “Repossessed” among them), but once school was back in session, half the kids no longer have time to read, and the other half might read the book but can’t make it to the afternoon session.

So today, in lieu of trying to come up with questions about road trips and family for this month’s read, I’m going to try a new tactic with the kids that show up: a “Talk About What You’re Currently Reading” book club discussion. This could provide me with some awesome book recommendations AND give me a chance to discuss genetics ethics (“Should we clone humans?”) when it gets to be my turn (reading Crichton’s “Next,” don’t’cha know — and yes, it broke my heart to hear he’d died) … So, win-win. And we’ll follow it up with a booktalk of next month’s book and a request for recommendations for future books to read in the club, which’ll tie neatly in with the talk-about-what-you’re-reading theme for today. Because I want to keep this thing going.

Uneven program numbers and lack of actual reading by the teen participants aside, I really look forward to my monthly book groups. Whether we discuss the actual book or NOT, we end up having fascinating, fantastic, brilliant conversations, with everybody talking and responding and thinking. It’s getting them to think that I love the best — asking them some question that makes them start to answer, and then hesitate, and then pause, and you can nearly see the wheels turning, watching them work out a new thought or a new way of seeing something. And sometimes they do the same back to me, asking me an unexpected question or explaining a thought so clearly and … and maturely that all I can usually do is end up exclaiming, “That was brilliant! BRILLIANTLY put!!” And it’s *awesome.*

And if our discussions stem from that month’s book — even if they didn’t make it all the way through the book — it’s even better. Because I’m left with the satisfaction of knowing that, one way or the other, this book has gotten them to *think*.

Y’know … some kids who used to come to book club every month have started coming into the library as of late (though not to the book discussion). Maybe I’ll flag them down and see if moving the date and time would help … and see if I can’t get them attending meeting again. After all, the teen book group is the best part of my job, a program that always taps into why I wanted to be a librarian in the first place.

“People are unusually stupid today. I can’t talk to any more of them.”

I SWEAR TO GOD, if ONE MORE PERSON comes up to the Reference Desk and asks me a question and then walks away while I am in mid-sentence trying to answer them, I am going to go Barbossa on their ASS.

 

… in other news:

“December clouds are now covering me …” [Well, October clouds, anyways …]

This morning there was frost on my car windows and I had to break out the ice scraper from the back of the trunk (which, mercifully, was on TOP of the pile of junk in my trunk, as opposed to being buried beneath it)* and attempt to achieve some level of visibility before driving to work. And if Charlie*** had not managed to achieve the Primary Goal so quickly upon getting outside, I KNOW I would have wound up with one of the splitting headaches which I get, very oddly, if my ears get really cold for any length of time. (Yes, it’s very weird. Maybe I’m part Ferengi or something.) And I broke out the OverCoat (TM) for the first time last night, my warmest coat before graduating to the full-out parka-esque Winter Coat.

What all this means, then, basically, is that I will passionately hate Outside from now until about mid-April of 2009. Dammit, but I hate the cold.

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* Last Christmas, my family came up to visit for a few days in Pittsburgh, and I cleaned out the worst of the clutter from my flat by shoving it into the back of the trunk of my car until they left. Well, it’s been about 43 weeks since they engaged in said leaving, and the crap is still in the trunk. Because J.K. Rowling** did not get Harry Potter published by doing HOUSEWORK, youse guys.

** Not that I am for an instant suggesting I am the next J.K. Rowling because, well, y’know. But it would be nice if at some point I actually wrote a story that had an actual ENDING attached to it.

*** My dog.

“OMG! Bon Jovi wrote the first Snevans fic in 1994!”

And just when I thought I couldn’t love them any more than I already do …

Bon Jovi Mad About Sarah Palin Using His Song:

“We are surprised to hear that our song, ‘Who Says You Can’t Go Home,’ was used by the McCain campaign at rallies yesterday and today. We wrote this song as a thank you to those who have supported us over the past twenty-five years. The song has since become a banner for our home state of New Jersey and the defacto theme song for our partnerships around the country to build homes and rebuild communities. Although we were not asked, we do not approve of their use of ‘Home.'”

Seriously, I ❤ them. Also, “Home” is my third-favorite Bon Jovi song, if anyone was curious.

Also: this journal will shortly be moving (at which point I will actually use it to actually POST on again), for a variety of reasons that shall be explained at said new journal … so I’ll keep youse guys posted on that.

“What *world* are we in??”

Today I nearly put my fist through my television screen, in my haste to turn it off, because some twit was on The Early Show suggesting that, what Hillary Clinton really needs, if she wants to “find out who she really is” (which apparently she hasn’t worked out already, which was news to me), is a “healthy and loving relationship.”

I mean — okay, yes, I voted for Obama … but DAMN, people!  What a thoughtless, sexist, STUPID thing to say!  What century are we in, again?!?

But then, this day started out rather pooey on a number of levels.

“Thank God I’m not single.” // “You *are* single.” // “Oh — yeah.”

(Spoilers ahead for Meyer’s “Eclipse,” if anybody cares …)

I’m currently changing the locations in our cataloging system for a stack of teen books just returned from the teen center, and I paused to flip through the third book in the much-loathed (by me, anyways) “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer. And I came across this bit towards the end, a scene involving a climatic battle between the too-h0tt!-for-mortal-comprehension vampire-lover-hero Edward, and some chick named Victoria, who is apparently the villain of the book. It’s told from the first-person POV of Bella, the human twit too stupid for words who is the narrator of this soon-to-be quartet of “novels” (I use the term loosely):

She wheeled and flew toward the refuge of the forest like an arrow from a bow.

But Edward was faster — a bullet from a gun.

He caught her unprotected back at the edge of the trees and, with one last, simple step, the dance was over.

Edward’s mouth brushed once across her neck, like a caress. … He could have been kissing her.

And then the fiery tangle of hair was no longer connected to the rest of her body. The shivering orange waves fell to the ground, and bounced once before rolling toward the trees.

I forced my eyes — frozen wide open with shock — to move, so that I could not examine too closely the oval object wrapped in tendrils of shivering, fiery hair.

Edward was in motion again. Swift and coolly businesslike, he dismembered the headless corpse.

…

It’s all so clear to me now why so many girls and women swoon over this gorgeous character. What’s _not_ to love about a guy like that, am I right?

I’m off now, to continue changing book locations or to vomit into the nearest rubbish bin, I’m not sure which.

“Valium wear off?” // “Get your elbow off my side.”

Actual conversation overhead while waiting in line at the post office:

Clerk behind counter: “So, ma’am, where is it that you’re traveling to tomorrow?”

Customer: “Oh … I don’t actually know. I suppose I ought to find that out, huh?”

Yeah, probably.

In other news, I’m working an unexpected Monday night because the usual Monday night Reference Librarian is on vacation, and Broomhilda has already called twice tonight, and it is only 7 o’clock. This is one of those nights wherein the accumulating stress of the entire month is building up and building up, and then I get involved in these petty little Broomhilda-like moments that normally wouldn’t bother me but don’t hit me well when I’m already this close to having a complete and utter nervous-collapse breakdown, and if she calls one more time tonight I am likely to just completely and utterly go OFF.

I need another weekend and it’s only Monday night.