Library School Is a Sickness.

After eight hours at my library job, then a good three hours preparing my descriptive bibliography for Ed Valauskas's class, I was really ready to get away from libraries. I sat down in front of the television to watch an episode of Sanford and Son on MeTV. The scenario? Fred has discovered a set of 78 records featuring his Blues guitarist friend Blind Mellow Jelly. Lamont wants him to throw them out, but Fred doesn't want to part with his memories. Then Lamont convinces Fred to donate the records to a university library, hoping they can claim the donation as a tax write-off. At the library, they speak to a friendly librarian named Archibald. Fred remarks that in his day, librarians were always women. ("Unless he's, you know," Fred says, fluttering his hands.) "Oh, not always," Archibald answers. Fred and Lamont explain their desire to estimate the records' value for tax purposes. Archibald suggests $500, at which point Fred wants to take his records back. At this point I turn to my boyfriend and say, "Up until now, this story was plausible. But a librarian would never make an appraisal on the fly like that." Rob just laughed and shook his head. He's been doing that a lot since I started graduate school.