Gritting my teeth

One of the odd ways I'm sure that I'm getting less depressed as I age is this: when I hit a part of my day that makes me want to grit my teeth and hold on, generally the feeling passes.  After a few hours of going on, I recover my balance.  At some point, going on actually transmutes into simply being engaged in the moment again.

I could not imagine this at 19.  At 19, bad days were usually bad weeks.  Certainly a foul mood would last until I went to bed at least.  That doesn't happen so often now.  Yay for practice on better mental habits!

Odd encounters in the Library World

My passion for comics and genre writing sometimes puts me at cross purposes with my library co workers.
Ooh, and my love for odd things like marginalia.  And the amusing sullenness of teenagers.

I'm sure there are many other librarians out there who can explain, in detail, the relationship history of Scott and Jean of the X-Men, with digressions into the various times the Phoenix has died, and the fact that Rachel is their child from an alternate future timeline (and clarify that both Rachel and Jean have been Marvel Girl at various points), but none of them work with me.  (No, I wasn't just randomly geeking - the teen patron really wanted to know.)

I'm sure there are other librarians with a lot of knowledge of the major names in 1970s sf, because, for one thing Andre Norton was a librarian, wasn't she?  And she had to have had librarian friends.  I just don't work with them.
I'm not sure I would get along with such librarians if I did work with them - we'd probably get in fierce fights about little fannish details of this or that.

I did discover that the way to bond with my supervisor was to finally read some Judith Tarr novels.  I'd never read this author before, and I quite liked what I read (Avaryan Rising book 1, and the first two volumes of The Hound and the Falcon - I stopped when I hit the bits about the Inquisition coming for Gwydion, because I decided my mental state couldn't handle the Inquisition this month.)  But my primary reaction was amusement, I'm afraid, at all that unexplored homosexual longing.  In both the Avaryan book and the Isle of Glass, there are lengthy plot threads about unresolved, one sided homosexual crushes between a king and a body servant/squire.  Complete with longing looks and meaningful touches and wounds being tended and all.  I kept thinking "boy, if these books had been written in 2006 instead of 1980whatever, I bet that these guys would totally get together".  I'm not sure this is quite what my supervisor was thinking when she read them.