More things learned at ALA:
...from the trenches of ALA 2008
More later?
Leaving for Anaheim at 7:15 am tomorrow morning; but before I go, a question to ponder while avoiding eye contact with a lonely vendor:
What is it with librarians and puppets? They're more to us than just story time props, they're our spirit guides to conference attending or, better yet, a passive-agressive way of letting your staff know that you actually have a social life.
See you in SoCal. If you're wondering who I am, you may spot me by my attempts to pour the contents of a chocolate fountain into gallon-sized baggies....
I know: I haven't posted in a while and got distracted from the passion quilt meme. Maybe it was the whole Hillary-evil-Barack-good thing playing out on the evening news. Or the Sichuan earthquake and its impact on the Beijing 2008 Olympics. Or the logistics of smuggling in a pitcher of cosmopolitans into a Friday evening showing of Sex and the City (sugar-frosting the rims in the dark was a bitch, btw). Whatever the reason, I promise I'll wrap up the PQ meme before I leave for ALA. But first, a confession:
As the instigator of the Lipstick Librarian! site, I get a lot of e-mails from folks asking me to promote stuff or an event, mostly library or lipstick (go figure) related products, a web site or book. Some of the requests are funny, but most are fairly mundane.
Until I got an e-mail with the innocuous subject line "ALA Convention".
I almost deleted it without reading because experience has taught me it was most likely an invite to a scintillating vendor show explaining a product I still wouldn't comprehend afterwards, but I opened it anyway in the please-jeebus-let-it-be chance it was an invitation to a function involving all-you-can-eat strawberry shortcakes and an open bar. But I was wrong.
It was a plea. A plea for me to publicize an orgy in Anaheim during the conference.
At first I thought it was joke--I still wonder if it's a joke. However the message seemed so sincere that I suspect it wasn't joke but a real request from an actual librarian. The tip-off? The excruciating detail of his (at least I think it's a he) message: not graphic descriptions of the hoped-for soiree, but a list of the difficulties he's encountered. Apparently no one's responding to his Craiglist postings due to censor bots, librarians not reading Craigslist, or maybe, just maybe, lack of interest.
I'm betting on the latter.
If you're interested, don't even think of contacting me. I'm too busy configuring the optimal schedule for hitting as many vendor events involving food on as little sleep as possible. And woe betide anyone getting between me and the teeny computer-screen squeegee giveaway....