Dream Job

My senior year of high school I quit the crew team to go to work at the library as a book shelver (the official title was Library Page). I don't think I realized until I wrote that last sentence how ridiculous it was for me to quite the crew team. I loved crew.. I quit because I figured it was time for me to start earning money for college. It's true my family wasn't wealthy, but I think I should've taken the hint that if my parents had no problem paying the ridiculous crew team dues, then maybe we weren't so poverty stricken I had to get a job. Or, maybe I could have done some basic math and figured out a part-time job wouldn't cover much of my college education. This now explains some of the funny looks and comments I got from my parents and school counselor when I told them about my choice.

Anyway, that's not what I want to blog about. I made this dramatic sacrifice and got a job at my local library. It was kind of the most boring job ever, but I also kind of loved it and it had amazing perks. I have been thinking about it lately, and I think now that Ipods and podcasts and  Wifi have been invented it would be the best part time job ever. When all my kids are in school  I am going to try to land this job again.

All you do, all day, is shelve books which is mindless and lonesome work---perfect for listening to audio books! And, something I loved is that, even though I couldn't read the books as I shelved them, I could look at them and decide not to shelve them and check them out instead. I read such an eclectic selection of books that year, just because I was exposed to them. I read a lot of Christopher Marlowe, theology books, random books about cancer (I was always picking up books I thought were about something else, but they were really about cancer). I read biographies, plant identification books and I checked out TONS OF BOOKS about art--not how to draw books, but books  that had collections of art in them. There was this one book  that was just a bunch of photos of Edvard Munch's art that I checked out a bunch of times.And fiction---i read so much bad fiction. The 808's is where the poetry is at and I read a ton of stuff there that I didn't understand but I liked the sound of.

I don't think I felt really happy there as a seventeen year old. It's not glamorous and there weren't boys around to talk to--in fact there was no one to talk to because you weren't aloud to talk. But now, it seems like a dream job to me. I'm not even kidding.

Also, did I mention you done get overdue fines if you work at a library. So nice.