ALA and Organizational Promotion

Tags

american library association, boomers, emerging leaders, frustration, millennials, promotion, websites, young professionals

I’m happy to say that I am a member of ALA’s 2018 Class of Emerging Leaders, which is a prestigious and exciting thing. My teammates and I are working on a toolkit for the New Members Round Table, a group that naturally attracts the bulk of young professionals and new members of the library work force. Part of our toolkit is a sort of ALA 101, trying to break through the haze of acronyms to explain the eleven divisions and twenty-one round tables within the American Library Association.

Everyone I’ve contacted with regards to this project has been enthusiastic and eager to help if they can. The idea that new members might need some assistance in locating an ALA “home” is one with which there is no disagreement.

But that’s where things start to crumble.

For an organization serving a profession so inextricably linked to technology and its rapid changes, ALA’s websites are surprisingly problematic. They are difficult to navigate, inconsistently structured from subgroup to subgroup, and often provide only minimal information. Some appear not to have been substantially updated in months, if not years. For one group I tried to contact, the single visible means of doing so led to a defunct email address.

I am reaching out to the divisions and round tables to inquire about the resources they already have for new and prospective members, to try and compile what currently exists and see where there may be gaps. And oh, are there ever gaps.

I am shocked by how many responses indicate that little to no energy is given to attracting and retaining new members. At ALA conferences, I hear grumblings about drops in membership, less involvement from young professionals, and so forth. If you put no effort into explaining what you do, who you represent, and how membership could be mutually beneficial, why would young professionals dedicate portions of their frankly inadequate salaries, limited professional development support, and vacation time to involvement? It’s a build-it-and-they-will-come mentality that frankly baffles me.

I’m not saying that millennials are special snowflakes that need to be courted. I’m saying we’re underpaid, overworked, and unimpressed by an organization that presents itself in such a clunky way. Many of my peers fail to see value in ALA membership.

Wake up, ALA. A generational shift is happening right now. Boomers are retiring. You need us. I know that change in such a large organization usually happens slowly, but if ALA is to evolve into the professional powerhouse for the 21st century that we need it to be, it needs to get to work.

Get your websites up to date. Make the navigation and content categories consistent. Write the descriptions of what each group does and who it serves in clear language, rather than buzzword-laden formality.

My peers and those entering the library work force every day have energy and ideas, if only you would meet us halfway by showing a little enthusiasm for our presence. And I know that you can – I myself have met with nothing but welcomes and invitations to play a part in some efforts to enact some of these very changes. The divisions and round tables need to promote themselves. Make it easy to contact someone with questions about involvement, membership, and cross-group efforts.

Get on this. You can do better.

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Yom Kippur

Tags

faith, personal, plea, prayer, struggles, yom kippur

Avinu Malkeinu: A Prayer of Protest

Avinu Malkeinu —

Hear our voice:

Some of us have cancer.

Some have lost strength of body; some have lost memory and speech.

Some of us are in pain.

Some can’t find work.

Some of us bear the marks of human cruelty — inside, where the scars don’t show.

Some live with depression; some battle addiction; many feel alone.

Some have known shattered marriages, trust betrayed, hopes destroyed.

Some of us have lost the ones we love, far too soon.

And some of us have lost a child.

All of us have seen suffering in our midst.

All of us know the ravages of war — for which there are no words.

 

Avinu Malkeinu, why?

Avinu Malkeinu, are you there? Do you care?

Avinu Malkeinu, Hear our pain.

Hear our anger. Hear our grief.

Avinu Malkeinu, here is our prayer:

Give us the strength to go on.

Give us reasons to get up each day; give us purpose and persistence.

Help us to fend off fear and to hold onto hope.

Help us to be kind.

Don’t make us bow or grovel for your favor. Give us dignity and give us courage.

 

Avinu Malkeinu —

Show us the way to a year of goodness.

Renew our belief that the world can be better.

Restore our faith in life. Restore our faith in you.

 

— Mishkan Hanefesh, author unknown.

Rosh Hashanah / Yom Hazikaron

Tags

contemplation, jack riemer, meditation, remembrance, rosh hashanah

Let us ask ourselves hard questions

For this is the time for truth.

How much time did we waste

In the year that is now gone?

Did we fill our days with life

Or were they dull and empty?

Was there love inside our home

Or was the affectionate word left unsaid?

Was there a real companionship with our children

Or was there a living together and a growing apart?

Were we a help to our mates

Or did we take them for granted?

How was it with our friends:

Were we there when they needed us or not?

The kind deed: did we perform it or postpone it?

The unnecessary gibe: did we say it or hold it back?

Did we live by false values?

Did we deceive others?

Did we deceive ourselves?

Were we sensitive to the rights and feelings

Of those who worked for us?

Did we acquire only possessions

Or did we acquire new insights as well?

Did we fear what the crowd would say

And keep quiet when we should have spoken out?

Did we mind only our own business

Or did we feel the heartbreak of others?

Did we live right,

And if not,

Then have we learned, and will we change?

— An interpretation of Unetaneh Tokef by Jack Riemer

Protected: Memories of England

Tags

depression, England, memory, mental-health, Oxford, Pembroke College

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Old Memories, New Project

Tags

beadwork, crafting, etsy, friends, holidays, memory, personal, trevor project

When I was fifteen, a friend came out to me as a lesbian. Being able to talk to me and, I think, a few of our other friends gave her a sort of pressure release valve. She was afraid to tell her parents, you see. At first I was rather pleased to be the recipient of such important confidences, but over the months of that year, the stories started to unsettle me. My friend told me she was engaged in what sounded to me like a completely dysfunctional online relationship (how much was true or not is increasingly unclear with the passage of time, but I have no real reason to suspect falsehood). She had a password-protected blog that I had access to, and she described this relationship and a growing habit of drinking and smoking. Then one day she showed up to school with cuts all over her hands. When asked what had happened, she simply said she’d been trying to take a razor apart, and then changed the subject.

That’s when I panicked. I may have been only fifteen, and an innocent fifteen at that, but I could only think of one reason to take a razor apart. I’d been growing more and more uneasy about the things she’d been telling me for some time, but the razor incident sent me into a complete terrified tailspin.

I went to a teacher I trusted, as well as contacting someone I knew at a community-wide program providing counseling services at the local schools. On their recommendation, I went to one of the school counselors and ended up spilling everything I knew.

I lost the friendship, and if I were to be faced with a similar situation now I might handle it differently, but I still believe I did the right thing overall.

This isn’t a story I tell in detail much, and there are a lot of details I’ve omitted here as well. I bring it up now because after a conversation with a different friend recently, I have decided that a portion of the proceeds from all of my Etsy sales between now and the end of 2017 will go to the Trevor Project. I believe in the mission of this project. They provide services to LGBTQ+ teens in crisis, including chat sessions, phone sessions, and suicide hotlines. If my high school friend had had a place like that to turn when things were getting so intense and strange all those years ago, maybe she wouldn’t have been drinking, or getting so thin, or trying to take a razor apart. If she’d had a place like that to turn, maybe I wouldn’t have ended up taking action that lost her trust in the short term and my own in the long term. If I’d had a place like the Trevor Project to turn for guidance in how best to offer my friend help and support, I might have done things differently. I grieve for both of those girls, caught up in an emotional maelstrom and not sure where to turn for some kind of anchor.

So I’m making crafts, beaded ornaments and other things, many of which are inspired by the pride flags of different queer and trans identities. And it’s a fascinating challenge. Like the words I’m writing, every color choice and every organization of color has layers of meaning. It’s not just about indulging my own aesthetic whimsy anymore. I’m in the middle of making what I’m calling a “double rainbow” set of 1-inch ornaments – the ornaments themselves are a rainbow, and each is decorated with rainbow stripes of shining seed beads. I have enough ornaments in all the required colors to make two of these sets, and I’m going to vary the pattern slightly between them. The stripes must be joined together, and I usually use a contrasting bead for that. In my exploration of different pride flags, I’ve noticed variations intended to point out the presence of people of color. For example, the trans flag comes in two iterations, from what I’ve found. One has a white stripe in the middle, and one has a black stripe. One of the double rainbow sets will reflect this line of thought.

I admit that as a straight, white, cisgender woman, speaking about all of this is potentially problematic, since I don’t know much of anything about the experience of coming out or realizing you are in some way or another outside the “mainstream” in sexual and gender identities. Every word feels loaded with layers of meaning that I don’t even realize I’m not seeing.

I struggle with the shifting sands of the vocabulary preferred by the queer and trans populations, and I apologize profusely if I’ve gotten something wrong in this post. I recognize that it’s not your job to educate me on vocabulary or concepts, but I hope you will help me out if I really screw up. After all, who better to ask than the people living these experiences? I want to get it right and you know it better than I do. I know there are many elements I’ll never fully understand at anything deeper than the intellectual level, because I’m not living them. The best I can hope for is secondhand knowledge.

So… yeah. If you like my ornaments and you want to support a worthy cause, go to my store and buy. If you don’t want ornaments, I encourage you to support the Trevor Project outright.  

ARCS: New Batch!

Tags

advance reader copies, fantasy, goodreads, historical fiction, history, novels, reading, reading for fun, science fiction

• Words Without Music, by Philip Glass (left over from previous haul, released April 2015) I remember enjoying the Fresh Air interview with Philip Glass about this book, but I just couldn’t get into the book itself.
  
• The Tiger in the House, by Jacqueline Sheehan (Released March 2017) Took a turn at the end that I wasn’t expecting – threads came together nicely.
  
• A Crown of Wishes, by Roshani Chokshi (released March 28, 2017) I am so in love with this series I can’t even begin to tell you. IT IS AWESOME EVERYONE SHOULD READ IT THAT IS ALL.
  
• Sins of Empire, by Brian McClellan (released March 7, 2017)
• The Arrangement, by Sarah Dunn (released March 21, 2017) A married couple with a possibly spectrum-y kid decides to try an open marriage for six months, and unsurprisingly, Stuff happens.
• The Girl With the Make-Believe Husband, by Julia Quinn (Undated)
• Dark Saturday, by Nicci French (Undated)
• I Need a Lifeguard Everywhere But the Pool, by Lisa Scottoline and Francesca Serritella (Undated). 303 pages of generic tripe. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. 
• The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness, by Paula Poundstone (May 2017) Definitely brought me some happiness.
• News of the World, by Paulette Jiles (Undated) Read in entirety during my flight back from the conference. A Western that is both simple and complex simultaneously. Made me well up at the end.
• Ascension of Larks, by Rachel Linden (June 20, 2017)
  
• Unraveling (Unblemished, Book 2), by Sara Ella (July 11, 2017) First one was okay, second one is pretty clunky.
  
• The Writing Desk, by Rachel Hauck (July 11, 2017) Kind of heavy-handed with the Christian elements of the story, but a good story nonetheless.
  
• Sons and Soldiers: The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned with the U.S. Army to Fight Hitler, by Bruce Henderson (July 2017) Completely fascinating story of specially-trained multilingual interrogators in WWII. A local author, too!
  
• The Lost Ones, by Sheena Kamal (July 2017) Darker than I usually like, but featuring a compelling main character. Well done.
  
• Séance Infernale, by Jonathan Skariton (August 2017)
• Hate to Want You, by Alisha Rai (August 2017)
• Are You Sleeping, by Kathleen Barber (August 1, 2017)
• The Heart’s Invisible Furies, by John Boyne (August 2017)
• My Absolute Darling, by Gabriel Tallent (August 29, 2017)
• Any Dream Will Do, by Debbie Macomber (August 8, 2017)
• The Cottingley Secret, by Hazel Gaynor (August 2017)
• The Arsonist, by Stephanie Oakes (August 2017)
• The Half-Drowned King, by Linnea Hartsuyker (August 2017)
• The People at Number 9, by Felicity Everett (August 8, 2017) Life is too short to read books that don’t engage you.
  
• The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes, by David Handler (August 2017)
• Pieces of Happiness, by Anne Ostby (August 2017)
• The Quiet Child, by John Burley (August 2017) Dark. Plays on the paranoia that can develop from the human brain’s tendency to find patterns. 
• Unraveling Oliver, by Liz Nugent (August 22, 2017)
• Sip, by Brian Allen Carr (August 2017)
• Rebellion, by Molly Patterson (August 2017)
• A Stranger in the House, by Shari Lapena (August 15, 2017)
• The Blinds, by Adam Sternbergh (August 2017)
• The Daughters of Ireland, by Santa Montefiore (August 2017)
• Dinner at the Center of the Earth, by Nathan Englander (September 2017)
• Right Where You Left Me, by Calla Devlin (September 2017)
• Solar Bones, by Mike McCormack (September 2017)
• The Blind, by A.F. Brady (September 26, 2017)
• The Space Between Words, by Michèle Phoenix (September 5, 2017)
• Keep Her Safe, by Sophie Hannah (September 2017)
• The Child Finder, by Rene Denfeld (September 2017)
• The Thing With Feathers, by McCall Hoyle (releases Sept. 5, 2017)
• The Way to London, by Alix Rickloff (September 2017)
• Thanks, Obama: My Hopey Changey White House Years, by David Litt (September 2017)
• Something Like Happy, by Eva Woods (September 5, 2017)
• The Golden House, by Salman Rushdie (September 5, 2017)
• A Casualty of War (Bess Crawford Mystery #9), by Charles Todd (September 2017)
• Fever, by Deon Meyer (September 2017)
• The It Girls, by Karen Harper (October 2017)
• House of Shadows, by Nicola Cornick (October 17, 2017)
• The Rift Frequency (Rift Uprising Trilogy #2), by Amy S. Foster (October 2017)
• The Last Mrs. Parrish, by Liv Constantine (October 2017)
• Bonfire, by Krysten Ritter (November 2017)
• The Gift, by Shelley Shepard Gray (November 2017)
• The Library at the Edge of the World, by Felicity Hayes-McCoy (November 2017)
• The City of Brass, by S. A. Chakraborty (November 2017)
• The Black Painting, by Neil Olson (January 9, 2018)
• Everything Here is Beautiful, by Mira T. Lee (January  16, 2018)
• The Last Suppers, by Mandy Mikulencak (January 2018)
• All Things Bright and Strange, by James Markert (January 30, 2018)
• Tarnished City (Dark Gifts Trilogy #2), by Vic James (February 6, 2018)
• Rosie Colored Glasses, by Brianna Wolfson (February 20, 2018)
• The House of Impossible Beauties, by Joseph Cassara (February 2018)
• Tangerine, by Christine Mangan (March 2018)

DAYS UNTIL I PICK UP THE NEXT BATCH OF ARCS: 226 (ALA Midwinter 2018, Feb. 9-13)

Meditation

Tags

anxiety, breathing, meditation, prayer, religion, spirituality, stress management, Thoughts, yom kippur

Slow me down, Adonai.

Ease the pounding of my heart

By the quieting of my mind.

Steady my hurried pace

With a vision of the eternal reach of time.

Give me, amidst the confusion of my day,

The calmness of the everlasting hills.

Break the tension of my nerves

With the soothing music of the singing streams

That live in my memory.

Help me to know

The magical restoring power of sleep.

Teach me the art

Of taking minute vacations of slowing down

to look at a flower;

to chat with an old friend or make a new one;

to pat a stray dog;

to watch a spider build a web;

to smile at a child;

or to read a few lines from a good book.

Remind me each day

That the race is not always to the swift;

That there is more to life than increasing its speed.

Let me look upward

Into the branches of the towering oak

And know that it grew great and strong

Because it grew slowly and well.

Slow me down, Adonai;

And inspire me to send my roots deep

Into the soil of life’s enduring values

That I may grow toward the stars

Of my greater destiny.

 

— Machzor Mateh Naftali

Rosh Hashanah

Tags

high holy days, personal, reflection, religion, rosh hashanah, t'shuvah, Unetaneh Tokef

Let us ask ourselves hard questions
For this is the time for truth.

How much time did we waste
In the year that is now gone?

Did we fill our days with life
Or were they dull and empty?

Was there love inside our home
Or was the affectionate word left unsaid?

Was there a real companionship with our children
Or was there a living together and a growing apart?

Were we a help to our mates
Or did we take them for granted?

How was it with our friends:
Were we there when they needed us or not?

The kind deed: did we perform it or postpone it?
The unnecessary gibe: did we say it or hold it back?

Did we live by false values?
Did we deceive others?
Did we deceive ourselves?

Were we sensitive to the rights and feelings
Of those who worked for us?

Did we acquire only possessions
Or did we acquire new insights as well?

Did we fear what the crowd would say
And keep quiet when we should have spoken out?

Did we mind only our own business
Or did we feel the heartbreak of others?

Did we live right,
And if not,
Then have we learned, and will we change?

— An interpretation of Unetaneh Tokef by Jack Riemer

Birthday

Tags

birthday, poem, thirty, tuesday's child

Monday’s child is fair of face,

Tuesday’s child is full of grace,

Wednesday’s child is full of woe,

Thursday’s child has far to go,

Friday’s child is loving and giving,

Saturday’s child works hard for a living,

But the child who is born on the Sabbath day

Is bonnie and blithe and good and gay.

Thirty years ago, September 16 was a Tuesday. I really must try to trip over air less frequently. 

See How the Fates Their Gifts Allot

Tags

community, entertainment, Gilbert and Sullivan, Lamplighters, memory, mikado, nostalgia, Stanford Savoyards, stanford university, thinking

There is something thrilling about the sound of an orchestra tuning. It’s a sound that announces the beginning of something magical. It draws me in, somehow simultaneously settling my mind and making my heart race.

I have yet to find anyone who agrees with me on this, but I stand by it. The ritual of dimmed lights, applause for the conductor, and then the sound of first the strings finding their A, then the other instruments joining in – it’s beautiful and intoxicating.

On Saturday, I went to the Lamplighters Musical Theatre’s performance of their reworked “Mikado,” titled “The NEW Mikado,” at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. This production makes a valiant and largely successful attempt at retaining the musical and narrative structure of the original operetta while addressing the racial and ethnic aspects of the original that are uncomfortable and distasteful to a modern audience. Their solution? Remove the entire story from the setting of the fictional and highly stylized setting of the Japanese town of Titipu, and place it instead in a fictional and highly stylized town called Tirmisu in the fifteenth-century duchy of Milan.

And you know what? It works. It really, really works. I loved it.

But as I sat in the darkened theater, listening to the orchestra tune and then play the familiar melodies of the late Victorian operetta, my mind couldn’t stop wandering to my own past.

“The Mikado” is incredibly important to me. Every time I have seen it or been involved with a production of it in any way, it leaves ripples of impact in my life.

In 1997 or 1998, my mother took me to see a production of “The Mikado” put on at Stanford University by their Gilbert and Sullivan Society, The Stanford Savoyards. I remember sitting enthralled through it, and still have snapshot memories of the two act finales. After that, we went to several of the Savoyards’ productions until in early 2002, I decided to audition to join the chorus myself. I was fifteen at the time, and the production staff made it clear that I was an exception to their usual rules about the age of participants. But that audition, and then being in the production, introduced me to a new part of myself. It was the most daring thing I had ever done, I felt, and took me to a world of magic and camaraderie that opened my eyes.

I won’t deny that I enjoyed being the petted youngest member of the company. It’s always nice to feel special. But more than that, I was treated as an equal member of the effort to bring the show to the stage. And really, I was only two or three years younger than some of the others, who were freshmen at Stanford.

It’s hard for me to explain the impact of those few months of rehearsal and performance. Desperate for approval and encouragement in my singing attempts, longing to feel like a valued member of a community engaged in a shared endeavor, I really think that joining the Savoyards in 2002 was a pivotal moment for me. The weeks I spent in rehearsal, performance, and social interaction with the Stanford students in the company proved to me that even without a 4.0 GPA, I could keep up with these students I viewed with some awe.

Being in “Mikado” in 2002 (and “The Sorcerer” that fall, and “The Gondoliers” in the spring of 2003) gave me the courage to apply to Stanford.

As I listened to the familiar music on Saturday, my mind kept going back to May of 2002, as I’d wait backstage for the entrance of the women’s chorus. We’d all bustle about, putting finishing touches to wigs, makeup, and costumes, and occasionally pausing to listen intently to the faint strains of music and dialogue coming through the backstage PA system, praying that the tenor and the trumpet were both having good nights as they approached the high notes.

I remember the movements backstage as a sort of dance, as we knew exactly when to step aside for Ed’s manic sprint offstage at one side and re-entrance on the other side for the next verse, or to make our way to the exact spots for our entrance. At times I remember some people quietly dancing in the wings, compelled to move by music and adrenaline.

In 1997, “Mikado” planted a spark of interest in trying the stage for myself. In 2002, it showed me that I could, in fact, belong at Stanford and find a community there. In 2005, it woke me up to the fact that I was no longer enjoying the theater experience.

And now, in 2016? I have only rarely gone near Gilbert & Sullivan in the past eleven years. The memory of the overwhelming and frightening rage and loss I felt as I saw my time with the Savoyards ending has to some extent tainted the memories of the magic and passionate love I had for the experience. I’ve even flinched away from the music itself.

Perhaps it’s been long enough now that I can start reclaiming that music. I feel no desire to get back onstage, and the only thing I regret about my decision to leave the Savoyards is how long it took me to accept the end of the era for me. It was a life lesson in “leave before you hate it.”

Except for those moments when I hear an orchestra tune. During those moments, as the lights dim and the familiar combination of instruments all seek harmony on their A, I find myself briefly in the velvet darkness of the wings, or the yellow light of the cramped, crowded dressing rooms in Dinkelspiel Auditorium. And for a moment, I miss it. But just for a moment. Then I let myself float away into the magic of theater.