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| Dressed as Pippi Longstocking for my literary birthday party! |
October has been a very productive month. I’m so busy making my dreams come true that I have been away from posting anything in almost three weeks! I guess this is also what happens when you have an actual job to go to. Yay library job!
I’ve also been busy having fun this past weekend celebrating my birthday, which at first I wasn’t even going to acknowledge, being happy enough to simply have a job at the library of my dreams (which isn’t the whole truth, I just didn’t think anyone in LA would care enough to celebrate it with me.) However, thanks to a couple of friends with kind hearts, I was encouraged to celebrate with a few activities – a literary birthday party being one of them. Thank God for actors because they are the only ones who wanted to dress up and then be in character all night, which made it a heck of a lot of fun – Twilight kids, Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, and Edgar Allen Poe, I’m talking to you. Thank you!)
It’s hard to believe it has already been a year since I celebrated my birthday in 2010, high on the trapeze after going on my first library job interview which didn’t result in a job offer (link to that post here: http://stand-uplibrarian.blogspot.com/2010/10/circus-that-is-merediths-first-library.html.) Now as I look back, it’s crazy to think about just how much I have experienced in the past year as a result of NOT getting that job. Get ready for an old school Oprah full circle moment…
In being forced to work as a waitress, a valet attendant, an executive assistant, a “background artist,” then be further humiliated and disappointed by endless people at these jobs, I learned the important lesson…to just stop doing them!!! Or kill myself, but that wasn’t an option because like my party, I was worried that nobody would come to my funeral either. Instead, I decided to go into debt by focusing my energy back to the library whether they were going to pay me or not. By depending on myself and having true excitement and passion for the work I was doing as a volunteer with the library, (not to mention having few friends left to distract me with actual fun), I ended up accomplishing far more than I ever imagined. I met Steve-O. The end.
I kid, I kid. Seriously, Steve-O should be happy he met me and I had the time to issue him a library card because that’s the smartest thing that “Jackass” has ever done. My point with this post is that I finally work with really cool people in an awesome library that I love and I am paid to be there. While I am not officially a librarian yet, I am treated with the same respect as if I were. For example, just the other day a patron said that our library has too many stairs and that I am too skinny and should gain some weight. I almost cried. It was only a year ago that I was just a waitress wanting to work at the library and here I was…unable to accidentally drop her food in her lap.
Listen folks, life will give you lemons and you could make lemonade but I say keep your dang lemons. I prefer carrots.
***Oh and I’m really digging that new Kelly Clarkson song “What Doesn’t Kill You (Stronger).”
“What doesn't kill you makes you stronger
Stand a little taller
Doesn't mean I'm lonely when I'm alone
What doesn't kill you makes a fighter
Footsteps even lighter”
I made a reference to killing myself but suicide is never the answer, the library is. It has saved me on numerous occasions. Unlike people, the library will always be there for you even when you feel you have nothing else. Information will always make you stronger. Trust me.
Celebrate yourself today.
-MM
Ending my birthday weekend by worshipping the stage
with a dance at the House of Blues. Hallelu-yeah life is pretty great!
