So much has been stuffed into my brain the last 48 hours that I can’t think of much other than “sleep” but I can’t sleep right now because my brain feels too stuffed. Right? Right.* Instead I’m going to spend a few minutes writing about movies and then go try to join the spooning that my cats are doing right now on the rug. Sometimes they let me.

Desk Set : watched last Friday w/ Katie & Sky
This movie wasn’t half as fun as I thought it would be. I love me some Katherine Hepburn, or at least I thought I did, but I spent much of this movie confused because she was laughing her crazy head-thrown-back New England laugh and I didn’t understand what what so godamned funny about the plot. Maybe you had to be there. The clothes were great and I took some small pride in the fact that the librarians were better than a machine (even if they were rattling off complex, memorized answers just like robots most of the time). Anyway, this is one of those LIBRARIAN movies that you’re supposed to watch and so I watched it and I think Party Girl should be our group movie if we get to vote on it.

Divorce Italian Style (Divorzio all’italiana if you’re being fancy): watched last night w/ Sky
This movie was hilarious and I really enjoyed that they made a totally hot lady (Fefe’s wife) look “ugly” by giving her a unibrow and a mustache. Those hips were out of this world. Also the weird dubbing was pretty great and I loved all of the clothes and I’d like to live in a castle now.

Visual Acoustics: watched tonight w/ Sky
This film has been selling out @ Northwest Film Forum – so much so that they were showing it in both theaters tonight. It’s a documentary about Julius Shulman, a world famous photographer who is best known for capturing modern architecture in Southern California: Case Study Houses, Palm Springs, etc. He was a swell guy and the documentary had a lot of great footage of him visiting with all sorts of people: previous owners of houses, new owners, and architects. Shulman was a pleasure to watch, and his photographs were amazing. That’s about all that was good about this documentary, though. There were all sorts of woozy special effects, random Jib Jab style animations, a not very cohesive story line and weird edits throughout. It seemed more like a really long Power Point presentation (with some video thrown in) than a film. A few times they didn’t give names of people who were talking until they’d been on screen for a minute or so – super frustrating.

It wasn’t an awful documentary, but it wasn’t a good one, either. I’m a connoisseur of the documentary film, and it makes me cranky when I see half of Seattle lining up to see a mediocre one when there are so many AMAZING ones slipping under the radar every day. I also take issue with people who assume documentary making is easy, or easier than making a fiction film.

* Brain is stuffed due to entirely new job in entirely new place which I don’t really want to talk about because I’m still trying to reconcile myself with the fact that I have an entirely new job in an entirely new place

Pretty much once a week I have a patron rush up to me and whisper “ooooHH! I saw a missed connection about you!” and pretty much once a week someone from our branch consults craigslist or The Stranger and finds that indeed, someone at Capitol Hill was being admired. But rarely is it a librarian. Usually it’s a young, dewy shelver. Or a smiling, also young clerk. It’s never me, because I work with a lot of hot, young people.

Imagine my suprise, however, when a neighborhood type person rushed up to me and said “ooooHH! I saw an ‘I Saw U’ ad about you! It was definitely you because of the tattoos!” I verified the information, being a thorough librarian, and learned that alas, my moment had finally come. I missed the edition of The Stranger this was printed in, so I can’t clip it for posterity as as Pop Culture Librarian suggested. Instead I will post it to my blog so I can visit it on days when I’m feeling frumpy and demonic.

Angelic librarian @Cap Hill branch
You: gorgeous brunette woman with tattoo on inside of left wrist. You helped me find A Twist of the Wrist (motorcycling not cooking) on 1/23. I finally got my wits and came back, but your shift was over. Let’s meet for a drink and conversation.

P.S. Even if I were single I wouldn’t contact the guy: he was cute, but the face he made when I asked him if he wanted the book about cooking or the one about motorcycles he made a face and said “motorcycling” in a super macho way. Doesn’t he know women like men who can make them waffles?

I sat down a few times to write about what I saw but honestly I can’t do it justice. I laughed, I cried, I wished I was living in New York City in 1969.

There’s a short summary of the show posted on Line Out. The writeup gives an accurate blow-by-blow but doesn’t do much to explain what it felt like.

At the end of the evening Patti performed an staggeringly awesome and heartfelt a capella version of “Because the Night” wherein she asked us to help her sing the refrain. There’s a video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHiHq6VoHrQ (she begins singing a few minutes in)

I love that she narrated the guitar solo, Literal Video style!

Last weekend I jetted down to lovely C-A-L-I to visit my bestie, Jaime. She’s subletting a sweet piece of house, perched over the estuary that runs through Alameda. It was like staying on a houseboat, only the houseboat was attached.

I didn’t get the sunshiney Valhalla I’d expected since it rained 90% of the time I was there, but that was fine. I caught some sunshine my first morning there as we drank boozy coffee on the huge porch. When it did rain, it was often in big, gusty sheets; watching the rain pound the water outside the window was fun, but seeing the poor birdies trying to fly against the wind wasn’t so great. Poor seagulls.

We had some excellent meals, including a lunch at the new branch of Burma Superstar which was just blocks from Jaime’s place! We also had some heavenly burritos and some ridiculously delicious french macaroons.

We watched two scary movies: Orphan and Paranormal Activity. We watched Orphan because it featured our mutual movie boyfriend Peter Sarsgaard. The plot to this one was fun and creative and I enjoyed that they took the time to build up a good story with interesting characters. Paranormal Activity wasn’t half as scary as I’d set it up to be, but it did give me the willies in a few spots. We also watched Up in the Air. I found it kinda depressing, but there were some interesting moments.

The last night I was there we stopped by the house of a friend of Jaime’s: we had some lovely wine (okay a lot of lovely wine) and hung out with the couple and their 9-year-old son who RULED. So often kids are left at home when parents go to visit or put down to sleep in a bedroom when company is over, but this family had their son hanging out with us for most of the evening. It was so fun – we played Spongebob SORRY! and drew pictures and giggled and played hide and seek. Seeing a well adjusted kid enjoying time with his parents yet letting them be adults and have conversations was pretty awesome.

We had plans to visit San Francisco and maybe drop in on some friends, but Monday morning we both woke with awful hangovers. I guess we aren’t 23 anymore. The storm was raging outside so we ordered pizza delivery and sat around chatting. We never left the 94501 zip code and I’m not one bit sorry. It felt like old times when we both lived in the city – back then we didn’t spend our time jetting from place to place trying to mark things off of a list. We just talked. Slept in. Read books together.

I came home, feeling a bit lonely but happy to see Sky. Then I was in Jury Duty for 2 days and got the worst haircut of my life. Both those things will have to wait for another post…

An email from a friend reminded me that I’d been Facebook status-ing (we need to come up with a verb for that) about job changes but never quite explained what was up.

So here’s what’s up:
Due to the budget cuts required by the city, the branch library hours changed pretty dramatically. In order to staff the new hours, there was some restructuring, or “management initiated transfers.”

My transfer was not to another neighborhood branch, but to the Central branch downtown. I’m going to be working in General Reference Services, on the 5th floor (the Mixing Chamber). It looks like I’ll spend a lot of my off-desk time online answering questions via QuestionPoint, txt, and chat reference. It’s going to be a big change, switching to 100% reference work.

When I first found out I was pretty upset – I’ve worked with the same coworkers and community of patrons for 3 years, and I’m very attached. In this new position I won’t be doing any outreach, programming, or work with teens and schools. I also won’t get the same interactions with patrons – no more reader’s advisory (unless I’m filling in on the Fiction Desk), no Rules of Conduct violation discussions (oh wait, I won’t miss those).

All in all, it’s been a big upheaval for myself and those I work with, but change isn’t always terrible and I’m staying positive.