You should go

I went to the library today and came home happy. Not the law library, the real library. The public library. You know, the place with books whose pages are filled with more than cases. I am now a card-carrying member of the Ann Arbor District Library, and the happy borrower of a few books, some music, and part of the seventh season of Friends on DVD.

If you haven’t been to your local public library recently, go. Really, go. Take your driver’s license and a utility bill (or your checkbook or something legitimate that has your address printed on it) and they’ll give you a card. Maybe I have a special fondness in my heart for funky public library branches because I grew up down the street from one and spent every summer there, but the library is a happy place to me. Go. Indulge yourself in a non-school book or two and keep them by your bed. There’s time to sneak in a chapter or two here and there. I promise.

But libraries are about more than the books. They’re an important symbol within our communities—a place where anyone and everyone can enrich their minds with books. Hell, now they carry decent selections of CDs, videos, DVDs, books on tape (okay, does anyone else find that highly ironic?), and so on. There’s a lot there to enjoy, and it’s important for the school-bound to break outside of the academic library setting and browse the aisles of your choice alongside your neighbors. It’s so easy to become fully insulated in academic circles, I know. Breaking out and spending some library time with the rest of your community can have a tremendous normalizing effect; the onion of your school drama cycle peels away for a little while and you begin to feel like just another someone who lives in the neighborhood and started jonesing for a Kennedy biography one afternoon.

In other news, I’ve mostly recovered from this stupid cold. All that remains now is a hacking cough. Oh, it’s a blast. Let me wax poetic for a moment about the ways I enjoy sounding like a 19^th century French hooker with TB during class. I like it almost as much as I dig forgetting to set my cell phone to silence so my Contracts class can enjoy Kelis’s first few bars of “my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard” before my frantic scrambling through my backpack can shut the thing off. I’m very disruptive these days and it’s not even intentional.