work week in review

As many of you may know, one of my cardinal rules for the blog is not to talk about work. At least not too much. No matter how much one's work is interesting to him or her, it is likely boring to other people. Plus there are too many stories about people losing their jobs for something on their blog. Plus I like to maintain some mystery about who I am and what I do everyday. The world doesn't need to know every time I exhale.

But I must digress from that rule as briefly as possible to relate a humorous anecdote. In the past week, I have been working on some articles about death. Dying. The cessation of life as we know it. In order to do this, I scouted out the local libraries for books on the subject, and I ended up checking out quite a few.

At the first library I went to, I checked out eight books on death. Perhaps I am projecting, but I really feel that the library was judging me. She gave me such a sad, pitiful and frightened look. It was more judgment than I expected from a librarian, but on the other hand, it really wasn't enough outright concern for whether I was about to go home to a dying family member or about to die myself. I kinda wish she had said something so I could have allayed her fears. "It's for work!" I could have said. "I have to learn about death for work!" And if that hadn't worked I could have said something like, don’t blame me, you're the one who works at a library that has all these books on death for me.

At another library for a second go-round of books, I decided to cut the librarian off at the pass by putting a non-related book on top of the pile. I chose the Stephen Colbert book "I Am America (and So Can You!)" but I did have doubts about this choice as I stood in line. Was I saying, hey, this Stephen Colbert book better be funny or I am going to want to die? Stephen Colbert makes me want to die? I have a family member or friend extremely close to death and I hope Stephen Colbert can pull him or her out of it?

I'm probably worrying about it too much. Maybe I know I would judge someone if they came to a check-out counter with an armful of weird books, but maybe they teach you how not to do this at library school or in bookstore training or what have you. Who can say. But today's Picture of the Day contains all my death books as well as my Stephen Colbert decoy.