Recent Flight Activity

July 21st, Monday
9.20am Dublin to Abu Dhabi

Feeling: Bit hungover to be honest. Went to a festival all weekend and though I haven't drank since Saturday, didn't sleep Sunday night thanks to beer monkeys*.
Beverages: A glass of wine at 11am from my Ethiad stewardess proves to be 60ml of tepid chardonnay. Two 330ml Heinekens because we're on holidays!
Culture: Fifteen minutes of pulling faces at baby in row ahead of me.  Snowpiercer.  AMAZING.  I have renewed respect for Chris Evans, please don't quit acting Chris. Lego Movie.  Awesome, obviously. 40 minutes of classical radio channel to promote nap, non-productive.  Wheee, we've landed!

9.40pm Abu Dhabi to Bangkok

Feeling: What? How is it nighttime? It was dawn when I left Ireland eight hours ago. What. Please let me sleep.
Beverages: ONE 330ml beer begged off our retiring stewardess is not enough for six hours, FYI Ethiad.
Culture:  100 pages of Jose Saramago's Blindness. WTF is going on there, I cannot even. I think I'll nap. Oh no wait that's not going to happen.  One hour of The Great Beauty. Surprisingly snappy and lush but I am simply not in the mood for thinking or reading subtitles.  Three episodes of Silicon Valley, which I have heard great buzz about. I am disappointed. OH THANK GOD, LAND.

July 22nd, Tuesday
10.00am Bangkok to Phuket

Feeling: WRETCHED
Beverages: Water, juice. Bangkok Airways serve us ANOTHER meal, my third in 18 hours of sitting down and doing little else.
Culture: InFlight magazine, cover to cover. FU Saramago.  I want to go to Laos now, thanks InFlight magazine.  Wait, we're HERE! Let's get on a boat for three hours and drink beer on no sleep, yay!

August 3rd, Sunday
8.30pm Phuket to Abu Dhabi

Feeling: Buzzzzing. Feeling good and well-rested. Bring it, long haul.
Beverages: Air Berlin give you BIG glasses of wine.  Me and Sally have two each before retiring for a sleep.
Culture:  I suddenly remember my body doesn't believe in sleeping when movies are available so I watch Twenty Feet From Stardom (excellent and well edited) and forty minutes of American Hustle before my headphones break.  Boooo, Air Berlin headphones. 6o pages of Curtis Sittenfield's Man of my Dreams.  Considerable turbulance over India. Sally told me she loved me while holding my hand and crying.

2.25am Abu Dhabi to Dublin

Feeling: Torrid. Smelly.
Beverages: Excellent. Juice and water when we board and lovely breakfast served four hours later.
Culture:  Grand Budapest Hotel. Beautiful and delightful to see Fiennes being arch but ultimately unsatisfying, sorry Wes. Wow, Tilda Swinton can play whoever she likes, can't she.  Seven minutes of Divergent.  No.  I can't.  2/3 of Million Dollar Arm which cut out before we landed. I wanted to see how Jon Hamm helmed something; answer is alright, but end product is slight, formulaic and patronising. Romantic thread is lazy and tired. As am I. I can see Ireland out of the window now. I hate it. Take me back to the East and I will never complain again.   Ugh ugh Ireland. Let's get a breakfast roll from a Spar on the way home.

END



*Beer Monkeys - AKA beer fear, copyright Clodagh Power 2011.

Nineteen Things That Will Break Your Heart When You Work in a Public Library

1. You cheerily accept books for checkin only to find they are coated in a strange unidentifiable mucus.
2. You cheerily accept books for checkin only to find pure, white grains of sand falling from the spine, sand from a land you will never visit.  Also the spine has been cracked from the heat and you'll need to repair it. Fuckers.
3. You gruffly accept books from a silent teen who never meets your eye and strikes you as sullen [It was a hard day and I didn't have sweetness left to squander on sullen teens, okay], only to be greeted with a whisper: "I really loved that one, the one with the 'Staff Loved' sticker on it".
4. Getting Copydex on your favourite cardigans (IT NEVER COMES OFF)
5. Throwing teenaged girls out of the library for throwing balled-up paper over the balcony.  One, wearing a Burger King crown (ironically, one assumes) mutters "fat bitch" at you under her breath as she slopes out; this girl you recognise moments later as the angelic child who had previously come to you for book recommendations for years of Saturdays, and who gave you a hug on your birthday three years ago. Your heart is rent.
6. Paper cuts  
7. When you offer your own favourite book as a recommendation to a carefully curated reader and, having checked it out to them with a knowing wink, receive it back from them three weeks later with the soul-crushingly dismissive comment of "I just couldn't get into it". [WOE]
8. Your personal pet, a bright-eyed, beautiful eight year old, who tells you he wants books on motorbike racing, because he wants to be a motorcyclist when he grows up, and drive very fast. When you express concern at the danger inherent in his chosen profession, he deliberates for about ten seconds and offers: "Maybe I'll work in the library instead so. Will you still be working here when I'm finished school?" When you tell him yes of course you will, he answers, "Oh good, I will be your boss then so."
9. Your terrific colleague who tells you to "go home, I'll stay" when it's your birthday and it's after hours.
10. When a favourite customer asks bashfully if you would mind awfully being a nominator on his Irish Residency application, and, after you have responded "absolutely!", starts to giggle delightedly when, under RELATIONSHIP TO APPLICANT you fill in 'friend'.
11. Speaking to a customer's daughter on the phone who has started crying because her father died last week and she just received an overdue letter from the library and she didn't even know he used the library and what on earth will she do next?
12. The woman who asks you for "happy stories, but no love stories, just women, being happy for themselves" on a hugely busy Saturday afternoon when there is a queue of ten people behind her waiting for you, but who then goes on to open her jacket and show you where her blouse lies flat because she got a double mastectomy four weeks ago, and "I just can't be dealing with sad stories at the moment".
13. The most glamorous, petite septuagenarian you've ever met, who walks into the library calling your name and saying "my gorgeous girl, so beautiful, you've lost weight again!" every day she visits, regardless of the hot mess you look on a particular day.
14. The regular, genial, gentlemanly patron who calls you by name and always asks how you are, then one day leans in to ask if you were planning on doing anything about the two teen boys holding hands in the Magazine area, because "it's just not right, there's children around".
15. Learning your favourite elderly newspaper-reader has died a month after he has been buried.
16. Showing a dad how he needs to fill in a form to get a membership card for his seven year old daughter, only to have him come back to the desk ten minutes later to ask you, in a whisper, to fill it in for him, because he can't read it.
17. This dad and his daughter goes on to visit the library every week and they take out ten books every time. The daughter happily tells you how much she likes reading because "Dad lets me read it to him!" 
18. The mum who turns back to the desk to tell you "thanks" for joking with her kids while they were checking out their books because "they're so shy, I'm trying to get them to be more brave and do things themselves, I can't believe they responded to you". Aw, jeez. 
19. The nervous mum who hovers as you chat about books you've both loved with her 17 year old who giggles like a ten year old and reads everything: "She had a brain injury last year and we want her to read novels about emotions because she has trouble recognising people's motivations since the accident". 
20.  The regulars who never check out a book but wait outside for the library to open every morning just so they can read the papers, tell you about the weather and say "enjoy!" to you as they leave. 

These things can be surmised into: people grow; they change; they get older; and they die on you.  You will never be worthy and people will always confound you.  Which is probably the root of all our heartbreaks. Let's all weep happy/sad tears together. 

Libraries and Social Media

"While libraries have been quick to take up social media technologies, creating blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and more, there has been little exploration of how successful these technologies have been in meeting library aims and whether social media is being used to drive a participatory service." 

 

Featured in  Library and Information Research Journal Vol 38 - 'Public Libraries'

High Fives All Round!

Storify. Who cares, really. I like the idea of it but, God, the effort.  And really, if you're only storifying one channel, why can't people just follow the hashtag on that one channel? These are the questions I asked myself repeatedly as I tried sifting through several hundred tweets from #LAICILIP14 last week. I gave up in frustration and tried again. I said "I don't care" and gave up again. Then I said "I'll do it at the weekend" and was proud of myself for structuring my procrastination so efficently. 

And now, I've just spent 45 minutes searching for and reading articles about Storify good practice only to start adding tweets and to find that you can't search for tweets over seven days old. OH WELL.

WORK SUCCESSFULLY AVOIDED ONCE MORE.