America: Not as dumb as she looks, for once

(Not these people, of course - their choice of apparel makes them look very smart indeed!)

We watched the returns with a big crowd from our neighborhood at our friends' house up the street last night. Oh, I was so happy to be among friends. We were nervous, tense, jubilant, teary, and, in the end, many of us were REALLY drunk.

Just like at the polls, it was a historically huge turnout. Dozens of adults, and dozens of kids bombing around like pinballs. As I looked at the pictures later, I noticed just how heterogeneous a group it was: vegetarians and meat-eaters, home-schoolers, teetotalers, musicians, bureaucrats, educators, our mailman, and French people. We were diverse in terms of religion, race, age, country of origin, ancestry, height, gender, orientation, hair color, education, taste in music, and opinion on vaccinations. There were jocks and there were geeks, and at least two or three people who identify as both.

But we had a couple things in common: we had all voted, and we'd all voted for Obama - even those of us who, because this is Maryland and the Democrats will always safely win here, often throw our vote to the Independent or the Green candidate. Couldn't do it this time. And when John McCain made his concession speech, we all agreed that it was the classiest speech he's made this entire campaign. THAT's the guy I've always respected, no matter what side of the aisle he was on.

And when the long-awaited, almost unbelievable moment came, and Barack Obama stepped out on the stage with his family, through our tears of joy, we all shared our host's appalled incredulity when he blurted, "WHAT is that DRESS?"

Happy new day, America! You, like Michelle Obama, are beautiful - don't let your stylist push you around.

One 'man, one vote -- step into the future

I just logged onto Flickr, and this is what I saw:



Just about everyone has posted their version of voter pride.

Mb shows off her free cup of coffee from Starbucks.

Dan Goodsell's popular character Mr. Toast voted.

The whole thing is making Manisha nervous and hungry. God, I know how she's feeling. I have found my way to the Halloween candy I don't know how many times today, and usually I have no interest in that crap.

Heidi out in Ohio is hopefully beating her neighbors until they all promise to vote Democrat.

Leslie rocked the vote - she votes at the church two doors down from me and I could have sworn I heard power chords from down there at one point this morning.

Jessamyn, well-known sexy librarian (also smart) made her allegiance known.

The craftiest woman in Baltimore voted.

And Julie from work, also a sexy librarian, praises democracy.

Lauren from Hampden showed off her sticker.

Inspired me:



The kids all wanted Sharpie tattoos today. After I gave Friend the Girl a spider and drew Yoda on Juicy Boy's stomach, put a huge Ziggy Stardust lightning bolt on Mao's arm and a rather nice witch on Zhou's, I treated myself to my own Sharpie tattoo.

I am counting the hours until Barack o'clock on pins and needles. I cried coming out of the polling place, and I know I'm going to be a wreck later - either way. Deep breath.

Soundtrack: Johnny Clegg and Savuka, One (hu)man, one vote

Both sides were against me since the day I was born

Nation:



Will my adoration for Sherman Alexie never end? I love him "tantalizing" Colbert with "skins."

I've seen how you sparkle / when fall nips the air

football, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

Geahh! What a weekend! Halloween is a battlefield, ask anyone.

Among other things:

Big Man Mao lost a tooth (a baby tooth) due to string-related complications arising from participation in The Gummy Relay at school on Friday.



(Not Mao - our pal WonderGirl)

Let me recommend it - if kid has a loose tooth, get kid to chew a gummy worm off a string as fast as he can. Tooth will come out quickly thereafter, and with no trauma at all.

But DON'T get all drinky that night, not if your kids sleep in bunk beds. Yes, I remembered to put the Tooth Fairy's reward - a cool t-shirt - under the pillow, but the next morning, Bob looked up to see Zhou - not Mao - coming into the kitchen wearing the new shirt. "Look what I found under my pillow!" he crows, beaming. Sensing that I somehow blew the Tooth Fairy transaction, Bob scurried upstairs, only to overhear Mao whimpering that the Fairy forgot him as he crawled into bed with me for another half-hour of shut-eye. "Huhh?!" I slur, "No, no honey, sure she came, she... snurrrr"

So Bob surreptitiously retrieved a novelty football from our stash of once and future birthday presents and put it under the boy's pillow, so when he woke up for the second time and went back to his room to get dressed - Avast! there was Tooth Fairy booty in its rightful place: under HIS pillow, on HIS bed.

The trick-or-treating this year was the best so far. Beautiful warm weather, and children who are finally old enough to run up and down the street without me panicking every time I lose sight of one (or both) of them.

Zhou's Frankenstein costume was both recognizable, due to the green face paint,



and functional - unlike, for example, the year he went as a dump truck.



Hard to climb porch stairs in that thing.

Mao's alien outfit was a little harder to puzzle. He wore his cousin Stretch's old spider top, and Neighbor Girl's starry stretch pants, and Nature Girl's silver boots, but his snazzy silver Captain Smekday cape



went AWOL somewhere between the Gummy Relay and home, so we had to punt a little. How did we do that, you may ask? Well... I drew a red lightning bolt on his face and he was Ziggy Stardust.

Did it make him look more like an alien? Yeah ok no. But he was happy, and it was gorgeous and unbelievably cool, and you'd think so too if my battery hadn't run out and I could have taken a picture.

In addition, there were parties - that's right, parties plural! With GAMES! "Sneak into the graveyard" was a good game: picture about a dozen women in their, ummm... thirties (let's say), most dressed as some variety of witch, crawling up and over and through a chain-link fence, trying to keep their tights, wigs, capes, frizzy hair, hats, and/or lit cigarettes from getting stuck in the chain-link. That was pretty fun. I only got a little hole in my tights and two funny lines of bruises all up and down my right leg. Back when I used to climb buildings routinely, I used to kind of love Mondays, surveying my body's minor dings and dents and correlating them with the weekend's activity.

(At the other party there was Charades. Let us not speak of it.)

But speaking of dings and dents, you should see the ones on the minivan! Here you go:



Woo hoo, right?! Deer season started on Saturday, and sure enough, long about 1am Sunday, we bagged us a big one! Stupid damn deer I swear accelerated INTO us as we were driving on Route 231 in rural Virginia. Probably broke its neck, and I know there's a couple thousand dollars worth of damage to the van. Poor dumb deer.

And why were we in Virginia? Because, in a spectacular alignment of stars and schedules, we found it possible to bust out of Baltimore after I worked on Saturday, barrel down the highway for a few hours, and get to, yes, a THIRD Halloween party, this one with music,



and John and Yoko:



Not to mention the Tooth Fairy,



jeez, where was that guy when we needed him?!

The next day there was a little nature appreciation,



a little football,



and back to Baltimore by bedtime.

TO SUM UP:

Dear teachers,
Please excuse my kids from still having a little Halloween makeup around their ears. We have been having too much fun to bathe them thoroughly.
oh and PS if I am late picking them up it is because the car is all jacked up, 'cause of the damn deer.

love,
Your Neighborhood Librarian

What's your name, little girl?

I have been giving people nicknames for as long as I can remember - at least since the day I realized that my given name is un-nickname-able. Oh to have been Elizabeth or Margaret - to invent a new nickname every time I changed my wardrobe! But I have one name and I always will, despite real efforts by charitable friends to come up with something interesting.

But that doesn't mean my friends are stuck with their names, and I habitually lengthen, shorten, translate, or completely ignore their first gift from their parents. For example, I am the only person (besides some homeless people in Seattle) who has ever called my husband 'Bobby' instead of Bob. Charlotte, Peter, Jerry and various Rachels have been called Carlotta, Pedro, Gerhard, Raquel. I staked my claim on a friend in college by shortening his already one-syllable name to, basically, just a vowel sound and a fricative.

And my kids - don't get me started on my kids. They've learned to respond to just about anything that comes out of my mouth in a certain tone of voice. Especially since I mix them up pretty frequently. What? They're 20 months apart - pretty much if I need the attention of one of them, I probably need the other one too, or at least he can tell his brother, "O HAI WHATSHERNAME SEZ DON'T DO THAT."

But there's worse. I have kind of a very bad genius for mean nicknames. I'm ashamed. But a little proud. And ashamed. In my defense, I never fire the first shot. It's always someone who has been either mean to me first or is a jerk in general.

My dear friend Bill once had boyfriend who was not nice - to him, to me, to anyone. That guy liked his cat and the Pope, and the rest of us be damned. Which, I suppose, he had a line on, because he was in fact a Catholic priest. On their first sleepover date he took Bill back to the rectory. So come on, he was basically begging to be named... Father Fellatio.

When I was a camp counselor in Maine, one of the girls in my cabin gave me fits. She teased one of the other girls whenever my back was turned, and would openly break the rules, and defy me when I called her on it. She had a habit of sneaking out after lights-out, forcing me to creep around in the dark, skunk-infested Maine wilderness (Stephen King country, full of psychotic rednecks and sentient, evil-minded... whatevers) with only a flashlight and a headfull of expletives for protection. I always found her with one of the boys from Cabin Josh (9 boys were in that cabin, 7 of them named Josh), and as I marched her back to Cabin 10, I would mentally compose the letter to her parents apologizing for sending her back to Fort Lee pregnant. I can't remember her real name. Lisa. But to me she will always be... Titsy.

Linda the Schizoid Drunk. Meatlips. The Scary White. Mistletits. Larry "I Speak French" Jenkins and Heather "Not Her Real Name" Hartman. (Not their real names). Barfy.

Oh god, I am going to get in so much trouble one of these days. No, but I'm not - I'm off it. Nowadays I have a blog, and I can satisfy my eponymical cravings with the nicknames I make up in captions or blog posts to protect the privacy of the people I like and love. They ain't ever mean. And when that fails, I can make up names for the 'regulars' at work, although truth be told, most of them name themselves by virtue of their... habits. Ick.

Little old lady got mutilated late last night
Werewolves of London again

Two days til Halloween! Hey, if you have a particularly nice costume - nice enough that it ought to have a name? you call on me.

We dress like students, we dress like housewives

Bristol and Sarah Palin, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

We went to our first Halloween party of the season last night. Zhou was Frankenstein, and Mao was an alien who called himself "Captain Smekday," inspired, no doubt, by a most spectacular book that I read to them six months ago.

I was very impressed by some of the costumes at the party. There was a corpse bride, and a corpse cyclist, pirates and witches and The Color Purple. I went as a 40-year-old punk rock girl, which, er, wasn't much of a stretch, although I did fish out an extremely aged Dead Kennedys t-shirt from the bin under the bed for the occasion.

The best costumes by far though were the two in the picture above, who did not come together and had not arranged it beforehand (as far as I know).

What's really messed-up - in a HILARIOUS way - is the fact that the grownup is dressed as Bristol, and the preteen (Leslie's daughter) is impersonating the mother! As bizarre as that family is (I mean the Palins, not Kim's or Rockerena's families), I wouldn't be surprised if Bristol's baby emerges a. older than Bristol is and b. already pregnant.

A Flickr commenter added, " I wonder what would happen if it came out black?" This, in addition to making beer come out of my nose, and if that's never happened to you, let me be your helpful informant - it's painful - made me think for a second.

After all, Bristol's baby COULD be black, although given Alaska's demographics that's almost pathetically unlikely... but hell, it could be all kinds of things. What WOULD happen? (Besides a whole bunch of us laughing until we burst a blood vessel and had to be given oxygen.)

I'll tell you what would happen. Given the reek of unreality coming from the Palin camp nowadays? They'd switch the baby at the hospital. Oh, in a heartbeat they would, you know it. It's all 9 to 5 kidnap-the-boss desperate hijinks around there anyway, I bet they totally found a pregnant staffer with the same due date who they're keeping close to Bristol - just in case they have to think fast.

I've got blisters on my fingers

Maybe getting old won't be so bad, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

Just a few things.

1. We're gonna WIN.
I think.

2. I took 500 photos yesterday.


Our friend Stacy asked me to take pictures of the merch for her business, Great Soul Wellness Studio, and the new coffee joint in the neighborhood, Grind On. We had, let's see... about 11 kids and babies changing in and out of t-shirts, grownups doing the same, and, memorably, my Bob modelling proper use of the Great Soul water bottle. We were lucky to have beautiful weather, and craft service from Grind On, and cooperative, funny kids.

3. I'm going to be 43 three weeks from today and that is ok by me.
See above picture. Can't get my glasses straight but that's ok too.

4. I found the perfect meme. Actually, Wendy did.

5. I have 50 books to read and review for the Cybils Awards.
I'm a panelist in the graphic novels category, and it has been a real treat so far. Some standouts: Rapunzel's Revenge; Ellie McDoodle: New Kid in School; Holly Black's The Good Neighbors
; and Life Sucks. But it's a lot, so if you don't see me for a while, that's why.

6. I'm freezing my butt off.

All of my filth is arranged in alphabetical order. This, for instance, is under 'H' for "toy."

Couple things:

1) MY NEW LAPTOP CAME! That's it right there. It's a Dell something or other with Ubuntu, and it has a NIIICE silvery keyboard with a real nice texture, and I turned it on out of the box and I was online on the front porch in less than three minutes. I am back among my family.

2) I got some new pink. That's it on my head. This time my friend Lisa Hawks did it. Lisa has her own beauty parlor, it's called The Chop Shop, very much like a sort of icky old-people restaurant in Cobble Hill called The Chop House, except not icky and if there are old people at Lisa's shop, they have tattoos and know all about music. And it is a nice place to hang out, in addition to Lisa being really good and very experienced at hair.

Adventure's waiting just ahead!

My men, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

I swear, I could stare at this picture all day.

By acclaim

And why not?

• I wouldn't have to move far
• I wouldn't spend my entire first term campaigning for the second, because I'm smart enough to know that this next one is a one-term presidency if ever there was one
• I would take a page from Carla Bruni-Sarkozy's book and promote the American fashion industry while in office, because GOD knows I don't have the clothes for it, and I'll need Todd Oldham to step in and dress me up
  
• I would apply basic parenting rules when making governance decisions: i.e. clean it up yourself, tell a grownup when you've fucked up, no hitting, etc.
• Truly arbitrary decisions would be made via rock-paper-scissors. And the FIRST round would decide it - none of this best-two-out-of-three BS
• Any combat would be modelled on Jedi fighting - slow motion, with sound effects, winner to be determined via style points
  
• I would restore the country's reputation abroad, mainly by having bitchin' parties and inviting everyone
  

No, no, I'm kidding. Vote for Obama.