The Pages Within

Make up the shit.

Give it to someone who wants the shit you made up.

They charge lots of people who want to enjoy the shit you made up something to read, watch, experience or listen to the shit you made up.

6.27.22

Magical thinking is another common way for children to survive abuse, and it can be interlaced with fiction. Since the forces of evil in your young life are so strong and prevalent, you have to imagine the forces of good are as strong and prevalent too. So that if you suffer pain and struggle past your endurance, then this means miracles could happen too. Waiting to be taken away, to be transported to another dimension which is your real home, to be materialized in a book or a movie, to be given your fictional friends in real life, to be given magical powers, believing you are special and chosen, believing you will become strong and powerful if you only wish it enough, and this feeling like an inevitable reality, that is magical thinking. It can get dangerous, because as a child you’ve learned that for a little bit of good, you need to suffer a lot, so by that logic, to get your miracle, it can feel like you need to sacrifice something big, pray endlessly, provide extraordinary circumstances and relentless faith, believe it into becoming the truth, or even give up on the rest of your life only to make it happen. It can go as far as a child founding their own personal religion or set of beliefs that are very removed from reality. 

Magical thinking is designed to help you survive as a child, but it can grow into an obsession, or something that takes over your life and becomes impossible to let go of, because you feel your life now depends on it. It’s a life of waiting and inability to let go of the thing you’re waiting for, because you lived just for that, it was the only thing that made sense.

One night he was writing something and his wife noticed he was writing from right to left.  Since she was studying occupational therapy she realized he had a learning disability and started working with him.  He slowly began to learn to read, and at 26 got his GED and went to college.

His first year of college he took the lowest level math course he could take, 001.  Over the years he worked on learning what he needed to, ended up graduating with a biology degree.  He then went on to get his masters and PhD, graduating at the top of his class.  He is now an extremely accomplished biologist and professor.

Also in there: therapist, early childhood educator, then finally: web developer–because by then it was an actual thing that existed. I didn’t actually figure out what I “wanted to do when I grew up” until about eight years ago, when I was 36. I tried pursuing writing when I was 30, stopped, then started pursuing it seriously again when I was 40. 

On Dec. 11, 27-year-old Lucy Yu — a chemical engineer by trade, most recently working as a supply chain manager — opened the bookstore, which she said she’s wished existed since she was a child. As violence against the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities spiked during the pandemic, Yu felt her lifelong dream become more urgent, she said. With the opening of Yu and Me Books, Yu is hoping to create not only a bookstore, but a community space that centers Asian storytelling and specifically immigrant narratives.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Yu said she never saw a space full of stories that represented her and her family’s experiences. “There’s not a lack of books being written about immigrants” or by authors of color, she said, which she realized as she began researching what it would take to open her own bookstore. But those books were never “put at the forefront of a lot of the bookstores that I grew up with,” she added.

[…]

Yu hopes that, in time, the bookstore will become a community space not only for sharing books, but for sharing personal, and sometimes difficult, stories. She’s already planning a partnership with the Cosmos, an Asian woman-led self-care and mental health organization, for next year. “We’re trying to create a space” where “people come and talk about mental health within the Asian community,” Yu said.

1 Write.

2 Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

3 Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

4 Put it aside. Read it pretending you've never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.

5 Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

6 Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

7 Laugh at your own jokes.

- children and teens who cant get home until a later time have a safe, warm, well lit, populated area to socialize, charge devices, rest, etc

- children and teens have a safe place to go to stay away from danger

if you want this, you need to be at your local community government meetings. you need to be talking to your representatives.  you need to be out there Lobbying.

Just a few weeks ago, my library, me, my coworkers, we had to write letters, send emails, make phone calls, speak at council meetings, just to beg our aldermen to give us our usual funding. Which they didn’t even give to us last year.  Losing last year’s funding forced us to cut staff, hours, and all of our databases.  If we’d lost this year’s funding? two positions would have been gone and we would have likely had to close on Saturdays.  On Saturdays.  The day of the week most of y’all working M-F jobs actually have time to go to the fucking library.

And do you want to know how much money we were asking? We were asking for an increase of approximately 13 cents a person.

13.

Fucking.

Cents.

ACROSS AN ENTIRE YEAR.

No one seems to understand how libraries are funded.  It’s not just Free Stuff.  It’s your tax dollars being paid back into your community.  It’s crowdfunding.  The highest cost anyone in my community pays for the library a year is approximately $250.  Divide that up.  That’s just $4 a week.  That’s less than a coffee.  It’s the equivalent of purchasing about 10 hardcover books a year.  For that price, you could have access to every book that has ever been written, a place to go that’s not a bar, programs for kids, teens, and adults, educated staff that can help you find the answers to your questions, and so much more.

You want these late-night libraries?  You want all this stuff?  Start fighting for it.  Start showing up.  Start making phone calls.  It’s not going to come out of thin air.  Start fighting to erase the idea that taxes = evil.  Start fighting to spread the understanding that taxes are what help us build a better society.

Make sure the people who represent you know that you want this.  That this is where you want your tax dollars to go.  That this is what you want them to support.  That you are willing to see your tax bill go up a few more dollars for this.

Because otherwise?  None of this is going to happen.  Libraries are going to keep cutting their opening hours.  Keep cutting staff.  Keep cutting programs and databases and collections.