I like to be myself.

Destiny 2 Cayde-6 Raw Voice (Without effect)

but my insurance, not understanding the severity of my illness or not caring, wouldn’t cover the surgery to fix it unless I went to the hospital and sat in the emergency room and waited for twelve fucking hours. that was the only way they would cover the surgery within a week.

to save MONEY

John Constantine's lockscreen....

[Text transcript at the end of the screenshots]

I'll let you in on a secret. I have a doctorate in education, but the field’s basically just a 100 years old. We don’t really know what we’re doing. Our scholarly understanding of how learning happens is like astronomy 2000 years ago.

Most classroom practice is astrology.

These tweets are from Dara Kass. She's an MD. Please take her advice on how to deal with this current situation. Read. Take notes. Memorize it. And protect yourselves.

This is why I’m not allowed on twitter.*

Some of them are very lovely objects, and deserve preservation because they are lovely works of craft in their binding or their creation; some of them are precious to an individual person, and so deserve preservation the same way a beloved stuffed animal, or carving, or jacket, or other object that has personal meaning imbued in it, deserves preservation. Some of them are the only repository of their information, or are a single historically significant repository, and so are valuable as historical artifacts. But none of that is because “they’re books”. Like every other object in human existence, they are valuable or not valuable based on their context and history or lack thereof. 

But a book is just a convenient way of assembling information, in one way or the other. 

When Nazis burned books it was not bad Because The Objects Were Sacred. It was bad because they did it to destroy knowledge forever. They did it to erase knowledge and information and words from the world. At that time and in that place, burning the physical copies was a very efficient way of doing that because the technology and dissemination of most of them was such that destroying these collections would make that information unavailable within their borders, or anywhere they controlled. 

It would in fact destroy that knowledge. 

When you chuck an old romance novel in the recycling - or even use it as kindling! - it does not actually destroy any knowledge. When someone carves out an old copy of a book to use for an art project, it does not destroy any knowledge. They’re just things; they have served their purpose. Hoarding impulses aren’t any less pathological just because the object you can’t bring yourself to chuck is a book, instead of an item of clothing or a broken vacuum. 

“Why can’t you host a book sale instead of just tossing them?” We already did and no one wanted them. Or we don’t have the staff or the time to host one without sacrificing something else that we’re doing for patrons.

“Why can’t you give them away to people who might need them?” If you understand why donating expired food or clothing with stains is not actually helping people in need, you should be able to figure out this one.

“You should recycle them instead of just sending them to the landfill!” A lot of books, especially books with library binding, can’t be recycled. Or they can be, but it costs a lot of money, which we don’t have.

“But surely it’s better to hold onto books if they’re still in okay condition!” Not necessarily! When we weed books, we now have the space for new books. Maybe we can get a new copy of a classic with better notes, making it more accessible to people. Maybe that book we just threw out had outdated information (we had to replace all of our solar system books, for example). Maybe the needs or interests of the community changed, and we can buy materials better suited to them. When we removed old reference material that was outdated and not being used by patrons, we had room to add new things, like musical instruments, board games, and sewing machines!

And also like, look: when the newest James Patterson book comes out, to serve our community we need to buy roughly four copies. In fact we have a system set up where a certain number of Holds on a title automatically triggers a new purchase of the title because otherwise the hold list lasts for like a year before our patrons get to actually read that book. At which point there is probably another new James Patterson book out. 

Two years later, we really, really do not need four copies of the same James Patterson book. MAYBE some of them will be sold! (And trust me we as a public library DO have book sales and they’re quite important as revenue.) But not always. Because actually by two years on everyone who wants to read that James Patterson book has probably read it. So yes. Some James Patterson is definitely going in the bin. Because every other public library also has this problem which means that the market is, I promise, flooded with James Patterson books. XP 

And this goes triple for books that actually do have time-sensitive information. In my previous job I was in an academic library where the Head Librarian was tragically and painfully allergic to weeding. One of the major programs for that (small) college was practical nursing. 

Let me be super clear: useful books in practical nursing have a lifespan of about five to ten years. That’s how fast the information changes, how often regulations change, these days how often drug information and best practices can change. It is a very fast-moving field and it should be. But that means other than maybe one or two copies for an archive that focuses on the history of practical nursing, fifteen year old practical nursing books are … .

Well. They’re garbage. Nobody wants them. And the fact that our shelves were cluttered with sub-optimal books in this area actually made it harder for our students to use, and discouraged them from trying to find helpful books in the library, because they’d have to hunt around for publication dates or hunt thru to find reliable books - and feel no assurance they were there. 

Conversely in the Literary Arts section in my current library, there’s less turnover because, well. The text of Pride and Prejudice is pretty much the same as it has been for quite some time, and that copy doesn’t get worn out. So. 

you go to the well to get some water, and here’s Miriam’s boy, staring at the sky, completely still. his expression is unreadable. you hazard a hello and ask how he’s doing, and he slowly, unblinkingly, lowers his gaze on you (he’s 8 and is missing his frontal teeth, not that this is making you any less uncomfortable) and says “I cannot speak of the state of my being, Nathan son of Saul, my brother, but rejoice for the water you shall take today will be as pure as the soul of the children of Heaven”

*sees J boy, 8 yo, staring at you from across the street*

kid JC, coming home at twilight, a single white dove following him and chirping with weirdly human-like precision:

 moth̫́er,̦͌ ̮̉i h͙̉av͔̽e ͓͗b̘̃r̞̓o̮͘u̲̒gh̟͒t̺́ you a do̗͐ṽ͙e̢͘ ͈̾m͒͢a͈̽dē̝ ỏ̘f ͈̓c̆͜l͔̂aỷ͇ aṋ̑d̳̿ g͢͞i̹̾fted̖͡ ̻͐it ͓͂w̖̿it̎͜h t̥̃h͙͒e ̨̒m̧̂i̡̍ŗ͒â̫cḷ̔è̤ ̛̻of̞̅ l̘̈i̛̦fè̳

Miriam: ! that’s my little boy :) now let’s go get ready for dinner :) 

her husband Yosef, a carpenter who only marginally got signed up for this: 

All of them were confused as they solely had counselors. I then realized that it was Just Me. It was Just Me with the hair pin suicidal ideation. It was just me with serious mood didturbances. It was really Just Me.

And this revelation isn't too discount my friends at all, but to highlight something that had been dragging me down:

I looked at my friends, thinking we were all going through it, and got frustrated with myself that i couldn't do even a teenie tiny fraction of what they could. I thought we were all fighting to live because we all joked about it, but somehow i was the only one "too weak/lazy/stupid" to keep up.