Hiya.
If you're reading this, could you do me a favour? I have a wonderful friend (katiedoyle) who was trying to put Haloscan comments into her D-land. It wasn't working for her, so I signed up and tried to put them on my own, to try to troubleshoot for her.
As far as I know, things are working out for me. I have all the bangs and whistles I'm supposed to have, but I don't know if they actually work. I could test it, but I rarely trust my own test to work, I need someone else before I'll believe it really works. So, like I said, if you're here, and you read all this, could you just click down on comments at the bottom of the entry and say hi, or tell me a joke or amusing anecdote and give those babies a test run for me?
I'd really appreciate it.
It's almost seven am here. I've been up since I woke up at six and couldn't get back to sleep. Me and these hours of the morning don't get along so well. Well, we could. I used to get up this early back in high school- I used to be on the bus by now, and then I had an eight o' clock class a few years in college, but, man, I don't really like it. I'm not adjusted to it.
There's a position opening at the library. They want a teen programming assistant. They want two years of college with coursework in education. Now, technically, I only have the Theatre for Youth and Theatre in Education classes I took my last year for something to do. Does that really even count for anything?
The other thing that makes me cock my head at it (puzzled German Shepard, that's me) is that it wants someone with knowledge of teen literature. What is this teen literature? By the time I was in high school, everyone else had finally caught up with me and was reading adult books.
So, by "teen" do they really mean middle schoolers? Those are the years we read a lot of real crap. I Am the Cheese, Flowers for Algernon, The Dark is Rising, those are among the best things we read, and even those aren't exactly what I'd call great literature.
I suppose, given the content of the later books, if I revised my target age-group of the Harry Potter books from seven up to eleven, those are currently the best "I'm a middle school student who refuses to read classic works," Harry Potter isn't a bad choice.
If I had an eleven year old, I would probably have them read Gothic novels, Dracula, Frankenstein, Rebecca, Whuthering Heights, Northanger Abby (it's a parody, but once they've read the others...), The Mytstery of Edwin Drood, Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson. They'd also read a lot of science fiction, metafiction, anti-estbalishment stuff (maybe not quite Catch-22, but on the way), because those books deal primarily with a different way of looking at the world. They'll get all that 'we have to be ethnically diverse and considerate people aware of the hardships of life' stuff in school, let them read good stuff outside it that'll at least fill them with ideas they've never been exposed to outside of the movies. Ideas work better on paper, they give you more to think about.
None of my suggestions are really "modern", but I think when you're eleven or twelve is exactly the right time to be introduced (if you haven't already) to semi-obscure classics; it'll make genuine classics more palatable. If you don't make a start reading classics by then, you'll write them down next to opera and other things "normal people" don't like.
I found an "Ultimate Teen Reading List" that has some good suggestions and a lot of chick flick books. Am I alone in thinking that most of these are the merging of a subtle romance novel and Are You There God, It's Me Margaret?. "I'm 15, and the universe is changing around me and I don't know what to do but everyone is like this aren't they oh my god does he just like me or does he like like me like me what do I do if he kisses me what do I do if he doesn't?!"
As close to this as I could ever get without puking were the Hadley Irwin books, and I could only read them because the two women who were Hadley Irwin were from Iowa- all their books took place there and dealt with places I'd lived and been. I could read their books and find the locations on the map, and know that, yep, that was exactly the way that place looked. I wrote them fan mail, but they never wrote back.
Sometimes I think that kids who spend too much time in that realm are the ones who turn into the emo kids. It's like they need a break from their own self-awareness, which is why the nerds sometimes turn out so normal, they spent between three and six years on another planet in three dimensions. They didn't have time to think about themselves so much.
The other thing about the library job is that they won't make their selection until sometime after the middle of September. I'm worried I'll be accepted for something else before then, and if I don't take it, I wouldn't get the library job if I held out for it.
Speaking of literature: one in four Americans didn't read one book last year. Read that again. That's a quarter of the population. Most of those who do read average four books a year. I've read three times that this last month. Granted, I have a lot of time on my hands, but even when I was in school all the time, I found time to read at least three times that on top of books for coursework.
At my grandparent's house, the walls downstairs were bookshelves and cupboards. The walls upstairs were cupboards full of books. There were books everywhere in that house (most of them were references, but you could see books in the house). My own house was full of books, they're everywhere.
Right now, I have a giant bookshelf- the back is a 4X8 sheet of plywood, and it's full of books. I have another one made out of an old crate, it's probably got about a 2X4 footprint. They're both packed and I still have piles of books at home, and plenty of books here that don't have a space because the other massive bookshelf is full of games and decorative stuff. I go to the library because I look around and can't find anything I haven't read half a dozen times. I can't imagine living in a world without books.
It's funny, though. We have probably something in the region of 80 DVDs, and I sometimes think that's too many. I can't regard them as decorations like I do the books, for some reason. Never mind the fact that there are plenty more I'd like to have, that's not a large collection by any standards. As many books as we have, I think I don't have enough.
That's something of a warped perception, isn't it?