I’m feeling (and looking) a bit like this poor unfortunate, except I can’t even use addiction as an excuse!  There’s just too much work and not enough down time happening right now.

I have a traumatic brain injury presentation to give next week, so I’m kind of stressing out about that, especially since I haven’t even started preparing for it.  I’m presenting to a bunch of directors and administrators, and I’m really afraid that I’m going to f*#k it up, thus ruining my budding reputation (har) as a bad-ass speaker.  Actually, I HATE public speaking, but people keep wanting me to do it and I have problems saying no.  Hey, maybe I should totally mess it up so they never ask me again!

I’m a hospital librarian, and we are a dying breed.  Many of my colleagues are either having their hours cut or are losing their jobs altogether.  One of my closest librarian friends here in town recently lost her job, and she worked for her employer for over twenty years!  She found out that they were going to shut the library down on a Monday, and by Friday of that same week, she was out the door.  She had to fight for a severance package too (those bastards).  She fine, though; she’s now working at the Univ. of Texas, Austin.  They snapped her up right away.

I’m one of two medical librarians in the Springs who is working full-time (or working at all).  The other full-timer works for the military, so she doesn’t really count.  Non-military folks aren’t usually allowed in her library, so it’s basically little ol’ me who provides most of the specialized medical info and resources for this neck of the woods, and it has become pretty demanding.  I’m getting calls from physicians I’ve never even heard of, and some of them are asking for complex and lengthy medical information searches.  I’m also starting to provide fee-for-service work to a couple of government agencies here in town (that have a biomedical focus).  It seems like I’m THE medical information broker for Colorado Springs and its surrounding communities.  Maybe I should ask for a raise!

I’m pretty burned-out at the moment.  If I’m not searching for CDC Tuberculosis guidelines for a freaked-out family practice physician, I’m providing telephone reference to a person who wants to find out about a drug-drug interaction, or I’m showing a group of nurses how to search for evidence based nursing information on one of our databases, or I’m trying to locate a very old medical book entitled A Treatise on the Scurvy, which was written in the mid-1700’s and can’t be found in any of my affliated lending libraries.

So, I’m going to take a blogging break for a week or two, and I’m going to try to catch up and de-stress a bit.  If all goes as planned, I will return to blogging a new gal, and I will be every bit as lovely as my alter-ego was when she was in her prime.  In case you’ve forgotten, I look almost exactly like this when I’m feeling rested and healthy, well, except for the hair.  And the pearls–I don’t do pearls.

(BTW — I’m a liar. I’m waaaay better looking than Grace Kelly)!

SEE YOU IN ABOUT A WEEK!

When I started this blog, I swore I wouldn’t become too political, because politics can ruin everything — fast, so this may be my only real sociopolitical diatribe.  Before I begin this rant, let me apologize in advance for any statements I may make that might offend some of you.  Please remember that I am just a single person (and a strange one at that), so my opinions don’t really matter anyway.   

The buildup of anger that I have repressing for so long started after 9-11, when Bush & Company lied about weapons of mass destruction and never stopped lying about everything that mattered, i.e. Iraq, the economy, Haliburton, torture, Cheney’s psychopathology, etc. for the entire eight years that Dubya was in office.  I’m still amazed and ashamed that we reelected that moron for a second term.  It shows how godawful stupid we are.  On that disheartening day, I wanted to move as far away from the U.S. as possible.  Siberia seemed like a relatively reasonable choice–anywhere but here.

Now we are in real financial trouble, and it seems like nobody wants to take responsibility for it.  Certainly Wall Street is partially to blame, but so is every American who has purchased a McMansion that he/she can’t afford, and who has maxed out the credit cards in order to buy the latest Gucci bags and gaming computers.  Now these bankrupt people who have been living way beyond their means and not paying their bills are weeping bitterly and imploring their savior, Obama Most Revered, to come to their aid, and Obama is saying, ”forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  In the darkest, blackest recesses of my soul, I’m thinking, “NO, we should not help these liars and cheaters, who prevaricated about their incomes and assets and everything else they could think of so they could purchase that beautiful new Yukon that gets 10 miles per gallon on the interstate.  If they wanted it so badly, let ‘em live in it.”  The sad thing is that I’m going to have to pay (and pay and pay) for their narcissism, even though I’ve always lived within my means, and I’ve never, ever been behind on a mortgage payment.

I’m just sick of us, sick, sick, sick!  We are a bunch of greedy, grasping, ignoramuses who only care about ourselves and our silly little lives.  I started becoming really annoyed while reading Mister Pip, because I realized I knew nothing about the setting of the novel.  I didn’t know where Bougainville island was, or what country (or countries) it was affiliated with.  My ignorance appalled me, and this made me become even more upset about the state of things.  Why is it that we’re more concerned about Britney Spears than we are about Darfur?  Do we even know how to find Darfur on a map?  Why are we lining the pockets of preachers instead of filling the coffers of the World Wildlife Fund?  What has happened to us?

This morning was my breaking point.  I was listening to the Today Show as I was getting ready for work, and Meredith Viera was interviewing some guy about Bristol Palin’s breakup with her baby daddy.  I remember thinking that I don’t give a flying f*#k about Bristol Palin or her boyfriend, just like I don’t care about the insanity of the octumom or what Michelle Obama is doing, or how to get in shape for swimsuit season, or how to bake a raspberry torte.  It’s like we’re hiding from the real world, and the media is promulgating our shallowness and stupidity.

Maybe it’s time for the U. S. to collapse.  Maybe we should let the banks fail and the car manufacturers disappear.  Maybe it’s time to get a dose of reality and find out what it’s really like to scrabble for survival.  Maybe it’s time we care more about the planet than we do about our spoiled bratty little selves.  The problem is that everything is so interconnected that if we fall, there goes Europe, and if Europe falls, there goes the rest of the world.  Crap!

So I’m right back where I started from–frustrated and unhappy about the state of the union.  I’m not sure whether this made me feel better or not, but at least it made me feel.  That has to mean something, doesn’t it?   No, it really doesn’t mean a damn thing.

We all make them–the problem is sticking to them!

1.  I will, without exception, stop reading a book I’m not enjoying by the 50th page (or earlier).  Last year, on several book blogs, I bragged about how I’m so good at setting aside lousy novels, and then I go and struggle through Edgar Sawtelle for practically an entire month.  I’m such a liar!  I won’t be caught fibbing about this again, though.  NOT EVER AGAIN! 

2.  I will continue to expand my horizons and occasionally read novels from other countries.  My goal:  3 or more by December 31, 2009.

3.  I will set aside at least an hour a day for reading.  Lately, I’ve been so busy geeking-out on the computer that there have been days when I haven’t read anything at all.  Once again, I prevaricated when I told my fellow book bloggers that I must read for a little while each night before falling asleep.  This myth was dispelled a couple of weeks ago when I nodded off in front of the keyboard (perhaps with my left index finger on the zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz button).  I stumbled off to bed without having read a single word all day.  Shameful!  Disgusting!  If I don’t watch it, I’m going to lose my brain and become an ardent “Dancing With the Stars” fan.  I’ll start watching reruns of “The Beverly Hillbillies” and fantasize about Jethro.  I’ll begin to say “y’all” and ”aint” all the time, and I’ll start chewin’ ‘baccy and picking my teeth with matchbook corners.

4.  I will read more poetry and attempt to write thoughtful, semi-literate posts about it.

5.  I will try to get through every TBR book piled up at home and on my Kindle before committing to any time consuming blogging challenges or other hefty reading related tasks.  Reading and blogging should never seem like work.  If they do, then I’m doing something wrong. 

Now, for a personal hygeine resolution:  I really will stop picking my teeth with matchbook corners.     

I have received most of the books for my Christmas giveaways, and I want to keep them all to myself!  I won’t, of course, but some of them look really good.  I keep glancing through Planet of the Apes, wondering if I should read it.  It looks like a fun and easy novel.  (It’s in first person, BTW).  Then there’s Drowning Boy, which seems kind of odd, but interesting.  I would love to read Falling in Love With Natassia, and I’ve never read Don DeLillo, so I’d like to keep his novel as well.  Drats!  It’s not like I even need these books!  I have so many unexplored novels lying around that my little house is bursting at the seams.

I’m afraid I must blame my current book situation on YOU, my fellow bookish bloggers!

You’ve created a monster here!  That’s right, chartroose has become a slavering, covetous, greedy bookaholic who keeps adding more and more books to her towering TBR pile(s) because one (or several) of YOU have recommended that I read them!  And that’s not the worst of it!  I still want more, even though I know I’ll never be able to read everything I want to before I die.  I could live to  be as old as Methuselah and still have a 500 novel wish list.  I think this is a form of mental illness.  Call it what you will: bookaholism, logophilia, tomescence™, bibloiphilia or just plain old book addiction–I’ve got it bad, and I don’t think there’s a cure for it.

Oh well, I guess there are worse things to be addicted to.  At least bibliophilia doesn’t cause cirrhosis or crabs or anything like that.  Book addicts don’t have many reading-induced ailments except for things like failing eyesight and expanding derrieres and paper cuts.  Sometimes, bookaholism can annoy your spouse, but, then, practically anything can annoy your spouse at one time or another, so it’s really no big deal at all.

There, now I feel better!  I’m still going to blame all of you for my disability, though, because that’s the American way.  From now on, my mantra will change.  I used to say: “I never met a man I couldn’t blame.”  Now, it will be replaced with “I never met a blogger I couldn’t blame.”  This seems more logical, doesn’t it?

This is really strange, or at least I think it is:  my post on American Psycho has had about four times more hits on this blog (around 2,000) than any other entry.  Christian Bale is second.  I’m definitely going to have to write about more hot male celebrities starring in screen adaptations of violent novels in the future.  Maybe this is the secret to becoming an uber-popular book blogger.

It’s kind of sad when you think about it.  Serial killers and Christian Bale are more entertaining to the average Joe than outstanding literary masterpieces like Angle of Repose or Anna Karenina.  Paris Hilton has more of a following than Nadine Gordimer or Kazuo Ishiguro.  Sigh.  It seems like we’ve kind of lost our way, don’t you think?  Maybe we never found our way to begin with.

Since American Psycho is still so popular, I decided to troll the net for proof of its enduring notoriety.  First, here are some funny pictures I found:

And here are a couple of dolls:

I’m not especially anxious to acquire one of these!

The latest news about American Psycho is that it’s being made into a Broadway musical.  Imagine that!  It’ll probably be a huge hit.

Here are a couple of pictures of Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman:

I don’t think Mr. Bateman would spend much time worrying about skin cancer, do you?  (Also, I’m not saying a word about Christian’s hotness in this photo because that would make me no better than the superficial people I’m ranting against.  NOT A SINGLE WORD)!  God, was he cut! 

Finally, Here’s a film clip of the tail end of American Psycho. It’s pretty spooky.

For good or ill, I believe Patrick Bateman will be a part of American popular culture for a long time to come.

Let me apologize in advance for this little phrase: …it’s a small world after all, it’s a small world after all…  If you can find me, you can kill me for putting that tune in your head.   Just remember that I run very fast when terrorized!

Actually, though, it IS a small world (or maybe it’s just my schizophrenic brain that’s a small world), but whatever the case, I’m beginning to notice more and more that everything really is interconnected.  People think the same things at the same time.  That’s why it’s important for inventors to patent their creations as soon as they can, because other inventors are hard on their heels with the same idea.  Consumers are just stupid enough to buy the earliest release of this:  or this:  before they get wise and realize they’ve been ripped-off and swear never to purchase anything resembling that item again!

Okay, I think I’m finally getting to the point of this post.  Cripes!  About a week ago, I was reading about brain synapses (due to my schizophrenia problem, har).  Researchers now feel that our brains never stop changing and growing and developing, which flies in the face of what we’ve been taught about our brains hitting their peak in our late 20’s or early 30’s and then kind of falling apart after that (dementia excluded from consideration, of course).  This made me very happy since I’m forty-something and was starting to worry that, due to my misspent and lengthy adolescence, I may become a blithering idiot by the time I’m 50.  Now that I know I have nothing to worry about…hey, get your paws off my pipe!

Ahem, so I read about brains and then checked my e-mail, where I found a feed of this article by Mark Morford.  Mark, who was a lit major in college, hardly ever reads novels anymore because he feels that his brain is being rewired by the internet, and he’s sure he’s not the only nearly non-reader out there with this problem:

“Proof?  That’s easy: Just try to sit down with that dense copy of W. G. Sebald or Haruki Murakami after spending any portion of your week online, and watch as your Net-addled brain becomes almost instanly anxious and frustrated, eager after just a couple thousand words to jump away, ogle pictures, watch dumb teens humiliate themselves on YouTube, buy some shoes.”

I do all of the things Mark mentions in that quote!  It’s kind of frightening, and now I’m beginning to realize that, while I still read a lot, I’ve slowed down considerably since my teens and 20’s.  The biggest reason for this change in my reading habits is definitely the net.  I’m totally connected at work and at home, and when I’m not searching databases for information for clients, I’m playing games, blogging, reading and replying to blogs, scrolling through Amazon, laughing at YouTube, writing nasty e-mails to my ex ( = and generally wasting hours of my time allowing my brain to be rewired so that it can only concentrate on written materials in short bursts and can only listen to soundbytes.  I truly am a member of the Borg collective!  Are you?

So, I found out that my brain is working okay, but it’s being rewired.  In his article, Mr. Morford points us in the direction of this article by Nicholas Carr.  Mr. Carr asserts that the internet is dumbing-us down because we’ve learned how to “power browse” –just skim through titles and snippets of information until we find what we need and then focus on snippets of that as well.  With all this “snippeting” going on, we are losing our ability to concentrate, and thus, more and more of us find it difficult to sit down and read a book for a substantial stretch of time.  We have become less able to analyze and synthesize all of the information that is pouring into our brains, so it is also becoming harder for us to comprehend the material we are reading, or to even enjoy reading it.  This is getting scarier and scarier!  

Finally, in order to wrap this meandering post up, I visited Julie over at Bookworm today and read her great post about sci-fi movies.  In her essay, she mentions Wall-E, which is surprisingly thoughful for a cartoon.  The human characters in Wall-E are totally connected to the web.  They are huge, fat slugs that communicate electronically and are wheeled around on tracks in lounge chairs.  Robots take care of their every need.  Is this where we are heading?  Will we become so wired that we won’t read conventional novels any more?  Maybe the future of the book doesn’t lie with the way they are produced (as in e-books vs paper publishing), but rather in the way they are read, if they are read at all.  Maybe reading is evolving into something else altogether, based on a kind of “wordbyte” means of written communication.  Are little twitter snippets of words and sentences representative of the future of reading?  Can you say “text messaging,” boys and girls?

Can chartroose shut up now?  Yes, after this excellent conclusion:  We r Borg.  U wil b asimilatd.  Resistanz iz futil.

Happy Mother’s Day!  Remember that our main purpose as wimminfolk is to procreate and procreate and procreate, no matter how miserable all this chile’bearin’ may make us.  Us wimmens must keep poppin’ out dem chillen’ until our innards is hangin’ down by our feet, or our husban’s take us behind the shed an’ shoot us because we’s too ol’ to bear ‘em (both the husban’s and the chillen’) anymore.

I was having some stomach issues this morning, and while I was lying on the couch recovering from the latest bathroom run, the “Today Show” had a segment on the Duggar family.  They are expecting their 18th child.  After watching their touching display of family unity for a few minutes, I had run back to the bathroom again, and this time, it wasn’t just my stomach problem that made me vomit.  Now I’m at work (and as you can see, I’m working very hard).  Before I get started on my mysterious librarian alchemy, I’d like to give all you mommies this lovely Mother’s Day gift:

This is the Duggar family.  Aren’t they wholesome?  I know this has nothing to do with books, but some wimmen read when they ain’t poppin’ out chillen’.  Maybe a few of those readin’ an’ chile’bearin’ wimmen will find this and be amused.  If enough readin’ an’ chile’bearin’ wimmen find this site and let me know they enjoy it, I can change the moniker to “Bloody Hell, It’s a Baby Barrage!”  This would make me very happy indeed.   

• 
•  When somebody mentions “literature,” what’s the first thing you think of? (Dickens? Tolstoy? Shakespeare?)
• Do you read “literature” (however you define it) for pleasure? Or is it something that you read only when you must?

I don’t like these questions because they make me think too much.  Thinking is bad! 

When someone mentions the word ”literature,” the first thing that pops into my head is that he/she is one of those “lit snobs” that I try to avoid whenever possible.  I mean, come on, who says “literature” anymore unless they’re middle-aged spinster high school English teachers who are so outdated that they believe in courtly romance and wear girdles to bed? 

Yes, I do think of Dickens, Tolstoy and Shakespeare when I hear the word, and I also occasionally read Dickens, Tolstoy and Shakespeare for fun, so literature doesn’t intimidate me.  It’s the classification of literature as being superior to other written works and the implications of this attitude that gets to me.

In its original form the word literature simply means a body of written work that defines a culture or a period in time.  Somewhere in our not-so-distant past, someone decided to change it a bit and throw “artistic value” into the definition.  This is quite irksome, because that’s when the judging started, and where there is judgement, there is inequality.  So we now have a bunch of novels that are considered to be “great literature” based on the opinions of a group of so-called experts.  A lot of absolutely brilliant novels are not considered to be “literate fiction,” in fact, they are either lambasted or totally overlooked and not considered at all!  Labels suck!

My favorite novels of all time are in the fantasy genre (and no, they aren’t the Lord of the Rings trilogy).  In my opinion, these novels are great literature because they beautifully illustrate everything that makes us human: our quirks and cruelty as well as our humanity and heroism.  If you’d like to find out more about them, go to this website.

I guess I’ve ranted long enough.  Down with the totalitarian hegemony!   

I’m kind of persnickety when it comes to reading.  There are certain genres that I will never touch if I can help it, and the most untouchable for me personally is romance.  If someone were to hand me a romance novel, I think I’d drop it as if my hands were on fire and then I’d have to run to the bathroom and scrub them furiously until they were raw and bleeding.

There are exceptions, of course.  I was forced to read Wuthering Heights in high school, and I liked it just fine, probably because Cathy died.  I was really into the futility of life at the time, and the tragic denouement appealed to me.  The Laurence Olivier/Merle Oberon film is terrific as well, and I try to watch it whenever it’s on TCM.

Thus, it is with deepest regret that I must admit that I can’t stand reading Jane Austen, and I really don’t understand her appeal.  The film versions are much more enjoyable to me than the novels.  Austen seems to translate well into film, but she doesn’t translate well from the page to my brain.  I’ve tried reading Pride & Prejudice several times, and a couple of others (Sense & Sensibility, Emma) at least once.  They seem trite and insipid to me. I could care less about the whole courtship and marriage formula that is so prevalent in these novels, and it really is a formula.  Austen novels are gothic novels without the supernatural elements.  The female protagonist needs to marry as soon as possible so that she won’t become a (gasp) spinster and will have enough money to enable her to live comfortably for the rest of her life.  She meets a guy with all the requisite qualities and falls in love.  Soon after this, something comes between her and her true love to jeopardize her future with this “man of her dreams,” but it all turns out well in the end.  Yuck!

I understand that middle-class women during the Regency Period needed to marry well so they wouldn’t end up destitute and shunned by society.  They weren’t allowed to go to college, get divorced or own property.  Jane Austen wrote timely fantasies about women’s lives back then, but not about women’s lives now.  So why do modern women love these, or any romance novels?  For me, there is no possible way I can suspend disbelief enough to enjoy the genre.  I’m more likely to be kidnapped by Orcs than to meet and be swept away by someone like Mr. Darcy!

So, this finally brings me to the subject of this post: what’s with the recent humongous Jane Austen sequel fad?  My local Barnes & Noble carries a whole slew of these.  I tend to shy away from sequels of any kind because they’re usually so much worse than the original.  These books have to be total trash, and I wonder why anybody buys them.  Well, at least the women reading these are reading something, which is more than can be said for most of the country.  I will continue to ponder this, but I doubt that I will ever understand our current attraction to derivative Jane Austen novels.

If you’re one of the aforementioned Jane Austen fans, please don’t hold this against me.