girderednerve

i keep having weirdly good (??) days at work and i guess i wanted to write about it, anyway

i got a raise wednesday, because i am the very very bottom of the pay scale at work and the county decided that it was comically low so they're giving me another fourteen cents an hour. and hey! money! i like having more money! but there's a part of me that's like, oh, yippee, an extra fourteen cents and you still want me on hand whenever to staff a hurricane shelter with, as far as i can tell, no PPE and no training beyond one hour-long online video. so fuck you. but also, hey, money!

but the main thing here is that i've managed to acquire projects that i care about and develop friendly relationships with most of my coworkers, and it feels really nice. one of the things i've been working on is a grab-and-go mystery bag service for the youth department, because we don't staff that desk in the mornings and only have a staff member available for assistance in the afternoons when we get all of our after school kids and i still wanted some services to be available back there. i've done bags on all kinds of themes; i did space and dinosaurs to start, then fairy tales, ocean creatures, mythology, spooky books, space comics, and now i have another spooky bag, one about dragons and unicorns, historical fiction, and one about cryptids. (someone wrote a kids book about mothman!) most of these have been checked out, and of course i can't confirm in any certain terms that the kids who checked them out liked everything or even most of the things in the bags, but it's still really satisfying that a thing i decided to do and manage myself has had a small but measurable effect on our patrons

awhile ago a coworker and i got sort of voluntold to put together a facebook live about graphic novels for an adult audience, and it went pretty well, so a colleague at a different library in the system asked us if we'd be willing to host a panel for the libraries' comic con over zoom, and obviously we said yes. so we've been researching and putting together a fun presentation about horror comics from the fifties to the present, and it's good that we're doing it together because i have terrible impulses and always want to get really academic about things. it's a fun project and it feels exciting to get to contribute to a county-wide program and have my work recognized, and it's also a good excuse to hang out with my coworker, whom i like a lot

we had a long talk today about committees because i felt kind of hopeless about the one that i'm on, and the coworker i'm doing a panel with gave me this really lovely pep talk about the work she's doing with the equity diversity & inclusion committee, which they had to fight and fight to even convene. they're going to implement a preferred name field on all of our patron records so we aren't just calling everyone their legal name, and it's this small late change but she really fought for it and was coming from this really genuine place of trying to make more people feel welcome and safe in the library. it was just such a kind conversation to have, because she was trying to tell me that i can help make positive change too. i'm not an incrementalist by nature but it's good to see concrete change in operation

some of the point of this long dull post is that i vacillate wildly between feeling like i'm not doing anything at all (i got paid to... google comic books?) and like i'm trying really, really hard, so sometimes it's good to write down a list of things that i'm working on so i can refer to it when i've become convinced that i do nothing, accomplish nothing, and am generally a schmuck

i realize i have been essentially absent from here but i tend to be quiet online in general. i really like the low-pressure 'reblog cute animal, whine in tags' thing tumblr has going on.

( life updates?? )